Oscar winner Redmayne salutes ‘a beautiful mind’
Portraying physicist Stephen Hawking in the 2014 biopic The Theory of Everything earned Eddie Redmayne an Oscar.
It also fostered a mutual respect between the actor and renowned thinker.
“We have lost a truly beautiful mind, an astonishing scientist and the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet,” Redmayne said in a statement on Wednesday.
“My love and thoughts are with his extraordinary family.”
Playing the brilliant astronomer, Redmayne embodied the subtle, but devastating, encroachments of Hawking’s degenerative neuromuscular disease, immersing himself in the ailments of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis sufferers and charting the timeline of Hawking’s life to better his performance.
The film focused on the relationship between Hawking and his former wife, Jane (Felicity Jones), and was based on one of her two memoirs about their marriage.
Redmayne told the Los Angeles Times in 2014 that he was so nervous upon meeting Hawking for the first time that he began rambling and asked Hawking his birth sign, to which Hawking quipped: “You know, Eddie, I’m an astronomer, not an astrologer.”
Hawking, who is often thought of as this generation’s Albert Einstein and used a speechgenerating device to speak, also held the actor in high regard after watching James Marsh’s drama, believing that he was, in fact, watching himself on the big screen.
“I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well in The Theory of Everything,” Hawking wrote on Facebook.
“He spent time with ALS sufferers so he could be authentic. At times, I thought he was me.”