Radioactive: Marie Curie film starring Rosamund Pike

There's been a particular trend across iconographic pop culture in recent years to shine a spotlight on the 'forgotten women' of history. Scientists, artists, activists and geniuses that have seldom made headlines are now illustrated and recreated in hardbacks and movie mockups.

Last year, we saw Keira Knightley don 19th century French suits to honour writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Colette, while Rosamund Pike went to a rougher, more hardened place than audiences had seen in her as Marie Colvin in A Private War.

It's Pike once more who leads the latest female biographical picture, Radioactive, as the Nobel Prize-winning French physicist and chemist Marie Curie. Not so much forgotten as simply acknowledged and passed over, Curie's prestige isn't debatable but her story still less familiar to a contemporary audience.

The film is based on the graphic novel of the same name by Lauren Redniss, and will be directed by Marjane Satrapi. Alongside Pike, Sam Riley has been cast as Pierre Curie, and Anya Taylor-Joy as the couple's daughter, Irene.

While it remains to be seen whether it's fruitful to group all similar movies under the same banner of 'feminist icons', reducing the individual stories as to promote a catchall woke idea, it's still always hopeful to be celebrating these stories, clearly long overdue, told by fresh new voices in an industry that desperately needs them.

Radioactive will premiere this September at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival, before being released worldwide by Amazon in 2020.