Add British actor Eddie Redmayne to the list of likely best actor nominees for his remarkable performance as Stephen Hawking, the most famous physicist since Albert Einstein — and arguably the best-known celebrity disabled by a progressive neurological disease since Lou Gehrig.
“The Theory of Everything,’’ which had its world premiere over the weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a tremendously moving and inspirational look at this genius — based on a memoir by his first wife, Jane (a superb Felicity Jones), who met and fell in love with Hawking when he was a fully able and very promising student at Cambridge University in 1963.
But a serious fall leads to a diagnosis of motor neuron disease, which is closely related to Gehrig’s ALS, and a doctor’s grim prediction that Hawking, then 21, would be dead within two years as his condition rapidly deteriorated.
Of course, it’s well known that Hawking is still around at 72, having published his best-selling masterwork, “A Brief History of Time,’’ detailing his groundbreaking theories. And despite being confined to a wheelchair and using a computer with a voice synthesizer to communicate, he’s a huge international celebrity who’s appeared in everything from documentaries to TV’s “The Simpsons’’ and “The Big Bang Theory.’’
James Marsh, who directed the Oscar-winning doc “Man on Wire,’’ sensitively reveals the less familiar story of how Stephen and Jane Hawking married and had three children, their love tested by the terrible progression of his disability, which ravages his body but not his brilliant mind.
“The Theory of Everything’’ and Redmayne’s superbly detailed performance take great pains to detail how Hawking gradually loses all but the slightest mobility and the huge burdens it loads on Jane as his caregiver. But this remarkable woman never gives up, refusing to take Hawking off life support when he’s stricken with pneumonia (which leads to him losing his voice — by now barely understandable — altogether).
All of this places unimaginable strains on their 25-year marriage, during which Jane falls in love with a choir director (Charlie Cox) who, in an unconventional arrangement, becomes a member of the family with Hawking’s blessing. Eventually they separate, after Hawking grows close to one of his nurses (played briefly in the film by Maxine Peake), to whom he was married from 1995 to 2006; Jane is married to the choir director.
“The Theory of Everything,’’ the moving story of an extraordinary couple, opens on Nov. 7. It’s hard to imagine it will be ignored when Oscar nominations are announced in January.