What The Theory of Everything doesn’t tell you about Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is a misogynist; and also, quite possibly, a narcissist. You wouldn’t know it from watching The Theory Of Everything, the new biopic from Working Title, in which you are invited only to weep when he discovers he has motor neurone disease at 21, and then marvel at his achievements in physics. It goes wild on the obvious cognitive dissonance of Hawking’s life and work — trapped in his body, yet transported in his mind to the stars.

I cried as Eddie Redmayne — as Hawking — falls, rises and is redeemed with medals too numerous to type; he is very good, but he only goes where the script allows him. But I do not like being manipulated by cinema, unless I know I am being manipulated; and Working Title is usually Steven Spielberg transported to the UK — all sudsy soap and sticky emotion. I am still angry that The Imitation Game, which was supposed to honour the mathematician Alan Turing, managed instead to call him a traitor. It stuck a Soviet spy in his hut, made him blackmail Turing, and he went along with it for fear of being outed as homosexual; less tribute than fiction.

So I read the book this film was based on. It is a memoir by Jane Wilde, Hawking’s wife of 30 years, and it is called Travelling to Infinity. (‘Infinity’, in this case, means ‘divorce’.) She wrote an earlier, angrier memoir, Music to Move the Stars; but this is now ‘revised’. Hawking too has written a memoir — My Brief History. This would never make a film, because it is too brief. It is almost an absence. So the film-makers turned to Jane for their story. They have used her shoddily.