Madame Curie

Madame Curie (1943) is an MGM biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Mervyn LeRoy drew on the biography written by Eve Curie — the scientist's own daughter — and reunited Greer Garson with Walter Pidgeon, fresh off their work in the Best Picture-winning Mrs. Miniver.

The film opens in 1890s Paris, where a young Polish woman named Marie is forcing her way into the Sorbonne's physics program at a time when women in science were treated as a curiosity. She ends up in Pierre Curie's lab, then in his life. Their shared obsession — pulling an unknown element from tons of pitchblende ore — drives the second half of the picture into something closer to a procedural than a romance.

Seven Oscar nominations followed, Best Picture among them. Garson plays Marie without any glamour of scientific genius; what you see instead is sheer tenacity — the woman who wouldn't stop weighing the same ore sample until she had her answer. Stream Madame Curie (1943) on iFILM.