The actor playing physicist Professor Stephen Hawking in his biopic has won an Oscar…
British star Eddie Redmayne received the award for his portrayal of Hawking in the screen version of Travelling to Infinity, the memoir written by his first wife Jane.
Disease
The film is called The Theory of Everything. It shows how Jane and Stephen Hawking defied medical prognoses and family advice to continue his groundbreaking scientific research, get married and raise three children – even though Stephen began suffering from Motor Neurone Disease in 1963. Doctors gave him only two years to live, yet he still survives and is currently the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge University.
Books
Professor Hawking (pictured above at NASA, the American space agency) was for many years the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge – the same post held by Isaac Newton, the genius who discovered gravity.
Hawking’s bestselling book A Brief History of Time explains the concepts of time, space and gravity for a non-scientific audience and he has published a series of children’s books co-authored with his daughter Lucy which bring real cosmology into adventure stories.
Acting
Despite his severe disability caused by MND, Hawking is able to communicate by gestures of his eyes and through text-to-voice software that gives him a characteristically robot-like sound. In the film The Theory of Everything Eddie Redmayne plays him as an absent-minded, untidy genius who enjoys the music of Wagner and submits coursework written on the back of a train timetable to his PhD supervisor. In a trailer for the film, Jane Hawking says it’s a realistic interpretation of the young Stephen – and she was able to help him with it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DSwrE8bxw8
The role was physically demanding for Redmayne, who had to study the typical effects of Motor Neurone Disease which attacks the body’s central nervous system, causing weakness of the muscles, slurred speech, dragging legs and frequent falls. It was an intellectual challenge too. The actor, educated at Eton public school and Trinity College Cambridge, specialised in History of Art and had very little training in mathematics and physics. Winning the 2014 Academy Award for Best Actor is recognition that he managed to get into both the body and the mind of Stephen Hawking and bring to a mass audience the very human story behind his mathematical genius and machine-like persona.
