My part in Stephen Hawking’s marriage break-up!
IT WAS seen as a fairytale pairing. He was the ailing academic with the debilitating disease who became a worldacclaimed physicist. She was the dark-haired beauty who discarded her studies for love, devoting her life to his care.
So when their 30-year marriage came to an end, and Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History Of Time, left Jane Wilde for another woman in 1990, the public was aghast: he had fallen for one of his nurses.
Now Hawking’s love affair and the subsequent public disintegration of his marriage has been portrayed in a £25m film entitled The Theory Of Everything. British actress Felicity Jones – best known as the voice of Emma Grundy in BBC radio soap The Archers, but whose film credits include Bridehead Revisited and the romcom Chalet Girl – plays the discarded wife and Eddie Redmayne, of Birdsong fame, plays Hawking.
‘He asked for a kiss . . . he was flirtatious’
During filming, Hawking and his ex-wife both turned up on set. It was a daunting moment.
Felicity says: ‘Out of the corner of one eye I saw Jane and her new husband and out of the other eye I saw Stephen. It was probably one of the most intimidating moments of my life. It must have been so bizarre for them to watch us playing them. It certainly felt awkward for me.’
Hawking and Jane watched a sequence during which Felicity and Redmayne danced. After the director yelled ‘Cut’, Hawking – who communicates through a computer-based speech generator – asked: ‘Would you ask Felicity if she will come and give me a kiss?’
For 31-year-old Felicity, that moment was a revelation. ‘It shows his rather flirtatious nature and this amazing capacity he has not to take himself too seriously,’ she explains. ‘I embraced him and told him, “You’re amazing!” ’
Felicity said her role involved spending time with Hawking and Jane themselves. Felicity says: ‘I met Jane at the Cambridge home she shares with her husband Jonathan. Jane told me she always felt Stephen’s priority had been physics rather than her. She would even describe physics as his mistress. She said she used to joke with him, saying, “You are cheating on me with science.”
‘When they divorced, Jane was lost. She had given up so many of her own academic and intellectual pursuits in order to look after this man – although it was something she wanted to do – but she had become so fused with him that, when they were no longer together, she didn’t even know who she was.’
The film, for which Jones and Redmayne are tipped for Oscar nominations, tells how Hawking, who has motor neurone disease and is confined to a wheelchair, met his wife-to-be at Cambridge, and how she coaxed him out of a profound depression and fought against doctors who told the then 21-year-old he would die within two years. She put her own academic ambitions aside to support her husband while he became a ‘superstar’ in the scientific world.
Yet while he was feted in public, at home he relied utterly upon his wife. The film is based on Jane’s memoir Travelling To Infinity: My Life With Stephen, in which she recalls: ‘He required my help with the minutiae of every personal need, dressing and bathing, as well as with larger movements. I felt like that traveller who had fallen into a black hole: stretched, tugged and pulled like a piece of spaghetti by uncontrollable forces.’
Felicity says she jumped at the role. ‘I read about all these great men in history and there will always be a great woman in the background doing the less glamorous stuff that keeps it all together. These women should not be invisible.’