The Theory of Everything

Stephen Hawking is a student at Cambridge University in England. He studies the stars and the universe. He is very clever, but he is also untidy and funny, and he does not know what to write about. At a party he meets Jane. She studies poetry, and she goes to church. Stephen does not believe in God. They are very different, but they fall in love.

Then Stephen goes to a talk about stars that die and become very, very small. He has a big idea: if a star can become one tiny point, perhaps the whole universe started as one tiny point too. This will be his work.

But something is wrong with his body. He drops things. He falls. He goes to hospital, and the doctors give him bad news: he has an illness in his muscles. It will get worse, and there is no medicine for it. His mind will be fine, they say, but he has about two years to live. Stephen wants to be alone. But Jane says no. She knows it will be hard, and she wants to be with him. They marry.

The two years pass — and Stephen is still here. He finishes his university work and people start to say he is one of the best young scientists in the country. He and Jane have three children: Robert, Lucy and Timothy.

But his body gets weaker every year. First a stick, then a wheelchair. Jane must look after the children, the house and her husband. It is too much work for one person. She stops her own studies. Her mother says, "Join the church choir." There Jane meets Jonathan, a kind man who lost his wife. He helps the family — with the children, with the wheelchair, with everything. Jane and Jonathan like each other very much, and everybody can see it.

Stephen's work is going well. He finds something amazing about black holes: they are not completely black. A very small light comes out of them, and so, after a very, very long time, a black hole can disappear. Then, on a trip to another country, Stephen becomes very ill with a chest illness. The doctors tell Jane: he can die now, or he can have an operation and live — but he will never speak again. Jane says yes to the operation. Stephen comes home with no voice. Later he gets a computer that speaks for him.

With his computer voice, Stephen writes a book about the universe for normal people. The book sells millions of copies, and Stephen becomes the most famous scientist in the world. He travels a lot. A nurse called Elaine comes to help him, and they become very close.

Jane is tired. For twenty-five years she has worked harder than anyone in the house. One day Stephen tells her he is going to America with Elaine, and they both understand. They talk in the garden — quietly, with no shouting — and they agree that their marriage is finished. Stephen goes with Elaine. Later, Jane is with Jonathan.

At the end, Stephen goes to meet the Queen, and he asks Jane to come too. They sit outside and watch their three children. Stephen is proud, and he types a short message to Jane about what they made together. Then the film goes backwards: the wheelchair, the stick, the party — back to the moment when a young man first saw a girl across the room. Stephen spent his life trying to look back to the start of time, and the film does the same thing with his life.

The illness was real. Doctors told him in 1963, when he was 21, that he had a motor neurone disease and about two years to live. He lived 55 more years and died on 14 March 2018, at 76. Most people with this illness live two or three years. A small number live much longer, and doctors still do not know exactly why. He was lucky in one important way: his breathing muscles stayed strong. In 1985 he became very ill in Geneva and had an operation that saved his life but took his voice. In the film this happens in France, not Geneva. His famous book, A Brief History of Time, came out in 1988 and sold more than ten million copies.

Here is the most important thing: the film comes from a book by Jane Hawking, his first wife. So we see the story from her side — more about the family, less about the science. The film also changes things. Stephen was ill before he and Jane became a couple, not after. They separated in 1990 and divorced in 1995, and it was much harder than the quiet, kind talk in the garden in the film. Jane finished her own studies in 1981 and married Jonathan in 1997. One last true thing that people love: Hawking was born on 8 January 1942, exactly 300 years after Galileo died, and he died on 14 March, Einstein's birthday.