Stephen Hawking Attends Premiere of His Biopic “The Theory of Everything”
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking made an unexpected red carpet appearance at the London premiere of his biopic The Theory of Everything held at the Odeon in Leicester Square. He arrived with his first wife, Jane Wilde, and together they watched themselves portrayed onscreen by Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones.
The film is adapted from Wilde's memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen that spans their 30-year marriage, writes The Telegraph. It is largely centered on the former couple's relationship, and looks back to Hawking's days as a PhD student at Cambridge, just before he was diagnosed by motor neurone disease, until 1989 when he was named a Companion of Honour by the Queen.
Redmayne and Jones have been widely praised for their portrayals of the celebrated physicist and his wife. Rumors are now abounding that the film will receive a nod at next year's Oscar.
Hawking, who admitted that he kept mistaking Redmayne for himself, was highly impressed by the actor's performance, according to the The Daily Mail.
Despite having encountered Hawking at Cambridge during his own student days, Redmayne felt star struck at the prospect of playing him.
"I'd been a student at Cambridge and seen Stephen across campus, heard his voice, but I was pretty ignorant so when I read the script, everything was a revelation," he said.
"Stephen and Jane let Felicity and I into their lives, so we felt an enormous amount of responsibility to get it right."
Meanwhile, Jones spoke highly of the woman she plays on the big screen, now a professor of Romance languages.
"Jane is incredibly open, she showed me photos of her and Stephen when they first met and I really felt I was getting this glimpse into an intimate side of their lives.
'Stephen and Jane have this wonderful unsentimental approach to life and such wit, so wherever we could we wanted to put that into the film."
Hawking's most famous work A Brief History of Time helped change the face of cosmology.
