Loving Pablo Picasso (Antonio Banderas) was sometimes a bruising job. The playboy painter juggled lovers, using them as inspiration while letting them know that they had to share him if they wanted to keep him. Dora Maar, who is played by Samantha Colley in “Genius: Picasso,” met him in 1936 in Paris. He was about to execute the anti-war painting “Guernica” and she photographed his progress, which helped him.
“She tried to engage with Picasso on an artistic level,” says Colley, 28. “She pushed him to be more politically engaged. She encouraged him to do ‘Guernica.’ Here is a man who was made better by this woman.”
Maar’s fatal mistake, says Colley, was falling for him. “That’s when it got tricky. She tried to keep up with him having other women but couldn’t handle it.”
In one scene, Picasso pushes Maar to tussle for him with Marie-Therese Walter (Poppy Delivingne), mother of Picasso’s eldest child, Maya. In another, she smashes her head against a mirror when Picasso rejects her for painter Francoise Gilot (Clémence Poésy). Maar was so distraught at the end of their relationship, in 1943, that she was treated with electroshock therapy, forbidden at the time.
“Dora gave her life to Picasso and one wonders what would have happened to her if they hadn’t collided,” Colley says.
“Genius: Picasso” is Colley’s second outing with the Nat Geo franchise. Last year she played Mileva Marić, Albert Einstein’s first wife, who was the only female student at the Zurich Polytechnic when Einstein enrolled — and who scored higher than he did on the school’s entrance exam. Marić dropped out in 1901 when she became pregnant by Einstein. That thwarted ambition eventually drove them apart.
“Mileva couldn’t do it all,” Colley says. “She couldn’t talk to him about physics and also be a mother, go to the supermarket and clean the house.”
Colley was born in Kent, England, and attended the Oxford School of Drama, where she had to master accents as diverse as Glaswegian, Liverpudlian, South African and American to graduate. Colley worked with a dialect coach on “Genius.”
Though she has twice played accomplished women overshadowed by famous men, Colley says both Mileva and Dora are more artistically satisfying parts than those she usually auditions for. “I still feel that in 2018, it’s really hard to be an artist who also wants to be a partner, a mother. How does a woman do it? You never ask a man how he does it.”
In contrast to Picasso and Dora, Colley had a joyful collaboration with Banderas.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to be working with a proper movie star. What if he’s mean, what if he’s horrible?’” she says. “He’s class all the way. He gave each woman he worked with a gold necklace with a pendant of the outline of a dove. It was a very discreet goodbye gift.”
“Genius” Tuesday, 9 p.m., Nat Geo