(4 of 5)
The Ideal Woman does not follow Greer Garson into private life. Offscreen, Cinemactress Garson is as much like Mrs. Miniver as Mickey Rooney is like Sir Galahad. Her extraordinary cedar-colored hair, intense face, vigorous body and wholly undomestic demeanor belie her serene cinematic impersonations. She is shy, and she takes out her shyness in polysyllables, parody, sentimentality and histrionics. She is voluble, with a remarkable memory and an intellectual ostrich's appetite for miscellaneous knowledge. (She once floored a shipmate of Ensign Ney's by asking if his ship used Worthington pumps.) She is playful. Sometimes she ribs the Ideal Woman by describing herself as "Metro's Glorified Mrs.", "a plushy-bustly-wifely," "a walking cathedral." Occasionally she enriches the English language with lines like her description of a visiting businessman: "The gentleman surprised me, young, gallant and full of schmaltz and flair and je ne sais quoi besides!"
But if Cinemactress Garson sometimes acts when she is off a set, she never acts up when she is on one. Those know her best who know her at her work. She never blows a line, never turns up late, never plays prima donna. When the scriptwriters were beating their brains out trying to find the proper "lift" to end Madame Curie with, it was Greer Garson who brought them some lines by a Polish poet which Marie Curie had liked. Those lines turned the trick. It may have been sentimental, but it was certainly indicative of the kind of professional regard Greer Garson inspires, that when Madame Curie was finished, the company presented her with a ring inscribed, "To Our Sweetheart."
The New Picture. Something of the cooperative spirit this act suggests inspires Madame Curie. The picture is much graver and more deeply felt than Mrs. Miniver. It was more daring and more difficult to make. It devotes itself to dramatizing matters seldom attempted on the screen: the beauty, dignity and calm of a marriage earnestly, rather than romantically, undertaken, the binding and illuminating power of a rare intellectual companionship and of grinding work performed in common. Madame Curie is probably as unerotic and maturely human a romance as Hollywood has yet attempted. It is equally successful in its popularization and humanizing of science, most successful of all in its tribute to its central character, who is all but canonized.
As Scripters Paul Osborn and Paul Rameau, Director Mervyn LeRoy and Producer Sidney Franklin have composed it, Madame Curie is not the story of Marie Sklodowska Curie's life, but of her association with Pierre Curie, of their first meeting, their shy, almost unconscious courtship as they work side-by-side in the laboratory, their surprised recognition of their love, their years of heavy labor in the cold and leaky shed where they finally isolate the mysterious new element, radium. The story ends almost immediately after Pierre's sudden death in a street accident.