‘A marriage can end and still be a success’
In spite of parting ways, Jane Hawking ‘wouldn’t take back a minute’ of her time with the physicist, she tells Celia Walden
‘Look what we made.” Anyone fighting back tears throughout The Theory of Everything let them run freely in the final scene, when Stephen Hawking types out these four words on his voice machine. In the Oscar-winning film about the late, great scientist – who died yesterday aged 76 – he and his ex-wife, Jane, are watching their three children playing in the sunshine. Their 25-year marriage is over, but so too are any recriminations, and there’s a sense that the love, loyalty and mutual respect that remains is as much of an achievement as those three children.
Their unconventional love story – so convincingly portrayed on the big screen by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones – captivated the world, as Jane told me, “because it showed that a marriage can end and still be a success”. I interviewed the 73-year-old back in 2015 just as the film adaptation of her book, Travelling to Infinity – had
‘I thought that I could easily devote two years to help him achieve his ambitions’
‘We had those wonderful children, and we kept going for a very long time’
been nominated for five Oscars, four Golden Globes, 10 Baftas and had grossed £77million worldwide. For those who knew the pioneering British physicist for his work on black holes and relativity and had read his books such as a A Brief History of Time, this was the film that would give them a glimpse of his personal life. One that was often as complicated and flawed as any other.
Despite their marriage breaking down in 1990 after Hawking left her for his carer, Elaine Mason, after 25 years, Jane told me: “I think our marriage was a great success. Stephen achieved what he wanted to achieve, we had those wonderful children, and we kept going for a very long time.”
Jane Hawking – then Jane Wilde – first set eyes on the young man who was to become science’s brightest star, not in the picturesque streets of Cambridge, as The Theory of Everything would have us believe, but in St Albans in 1962. Hawking was just 21 and about to be diagnosed with motor neurone disease, when he would be given two years to live.
“That was about a month after I first met him,” Jane explained when we sat down together in her son’s flat in Ealing. “We weren’t going out at that moment, but I was already falling in love with him. He had beautiful eyes and was such fun to go out with. He had this amazing sense of humour, so we were always laughing.”
The Cambridge PHD student hadn’t yet completed his ground-breaking 1966 doctoral thesis, Properties of Expanding Universes. Jane said she was “no mathematician and hopeless at physics”. But, she said: “Stephen could explain things to me in a way I understood. His intelligence fascinated me. We would look up at the night sky together and, although Stephen wasn’t actually very good at detecting constellations, he would tell me about the expanding universe and the possibility of it contracting again, and I did find all that very appealing.”
In James Marsh’s film, the newly diagnosed Hawking tells Jane: “I want you to go away and never come back.”
“And that was absolutely true,” she told me. “Stephen did say that. But by that stage I was so in love that I just had to come back to him. I thought that I could easily devote two years of my life to help someone I loved achieve his ambitions – somebody who evidently had so much potential.”
Nobody could have believed then that Hawking would not only survive for more than half a century – writing his bestseller A Brief History of Time in 1988 – but that he would continue to teach and write about the origins of the universe until his death, despite being confined to a wheelchair and having lost the ability to speak and to write.
And yet when I asked Jane whether Hawking was ever selfpitying, she shook her head. “He really wasn’t. I remember Stephen saying early on to me: ‘Where there is physical illness, you can’t afford to
‘There were plenty of times when I thought he wouldn’t make it’
have psychological illness as well.’ That was his mantra. And by extension it became my mantra too.”
However, after the emergency tracheotomy Hawking had to undergo at Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Geneva in 1985 – an operation that saved his life but robbed him of his speech – Jane said things did get “very bleak”.
Hawking had been so ill that the doctors in Geneva had asked her whether they should withdraw life support. “But I couldn’t let him die,” she told me. “I was the agent of life for Stephen.” Nevertheless, over the following years “life was just so dreadful,” she said, “so physically and mentally exhausting that I wanted to throw myself in the river – although of course I stopped myself because of the children.”
And yet Hawking and his wife were fiercely optimistic – a trait that clearly bound them. But while Jane’s optimism stemmed from her strong Christian faith, her husband was famously an atheist, and the two used to enjoy sparring about their differing beliefs, she said. “I remember once asking Stephen how he knew which theory to work on, to which he replied: ‘Well you have to take a leap of faith in choosing the one that you think is going to be most productive.’ I said: ‘Really? I thought faith had no part to play in physics?’”
Although Hawking’s fame “gave him the recognition he deserved for all his hard work” and was something he very much enjoyed, Jane told me, it didn’t make things any easier. “It drew all sorts of people into our circle and really made our home life intolerable,” she said.
However, after the pair divorced in 1990 – with Hawking embarking on a relationship with Elaine, whom he subsequently married, and Jane marrying the organist Jonathan Hellyer Jones – the tension dissipated.
Three years ago, Jane described Hawking’s life to me and the Sunday lunches she and the children – Robert, 50, Lucy, 47, and Timothy, 38 – would still enjoy at his house, just 10 minutes down the road from hers, in Cambridge as “a miracle” plain and simple. “It may be a miracle of modern medicine,” she shrugged, adding that the vitamin B12 shots her ex-husband had been having regularly had been very helpful, “and a miracle of Stephen’s own courage and perseverance, but it is also quite simply a miracle. There were plenty of times when I thought he wouldn’t make it.”
Jane never lost the sense of awe Hawking prompted in her when they first met, she said, and continued to feel “a great deal of admiration for him – and a lot of love too.” However hard those years were, she “wouldn’t take back a minute” she insisted.
And although Jane chose to grieve quietly yesterday, her feelings were very much in evidence in the statement Lucy, Robert and Timothy released: “He once said: ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love’. We will miss him forever.”