SECOND WIFE

Such was his iconic status that filmmakers spent years begging Stephen Hawking to let them turn his life story into a movie. It was time well spent. The film, The Theory of Everything, was a box office smash and introduced one of the world’s finest minds to a whole new audience.

For actor Eddie Redmayne, who won an Oscar for his role as the scientist, it was a moment off camera that best characterised Hawking’s unlikely appeal.

The professor had turned up on the set one day just as the crew were filming a spectacular firework show.

Eddie, 36, recalled: “Stephen arrived with his iconic silhouette – him in his chair, flanked by his nurses, up-lit by his computer screen . There was this extraordinary spotlight on him.

“Then on cue the fireworks went off. It was the greatest rock star entrance I’ve seen in my life.” Few people seem less likely to earn rock star status than the skinny genius with huge glasses, who was trapped inside his own body by a rare form of motor neurone disease.

Yet he did, never letting his illness hold him back and loving his every minute in the limelight. He once summed up his attitude to life, saying: “Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.”

Hawking, who died yesterday aged 76, revelled in his fame and, with first wife Jane, joined Redmayne and co-star Felicity Jones at the premiere of The Theory Of Everything in London in 2014.

The prof had cameos in The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory and in a Little Britain sketch for Comic Relief with David Walliams and Catherine Tate.

U2 enlisted him to record a voice-over to open their Paris concert in 2015, while Pink Floyd used his voice on their final studi Divis

He shou such Caine Peter

Nig Stri yeste time called

Ha her s

“H He lik exten

Wo Obam Quee and d of hu said: