Family & Personal Life

Two marriages, three children, and a private life as human and as complicated as the public one was luminous, told plainly and without sensation.

For all his public fame, Stephen Hawking had a private life of real complexity, shaped at every turn by his illness. He wrote about it candidly in his memoir, and the broad facts are well documented; what follows keeps to those facts and leaves the speculation to the tabloids.

Jane

Hawking met Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister, around the time of his diagnosis in 1962 and 1963. Their relationship gave him a reason to fight on when the prognosis had left him without one, and they married in 1965. Jane was studying for a degree in modern languages and went on to earn a doctorate of her own while raising their family and caring for an increasingly disabled husband.

They had three children: Robert, born in 1967, Lucy, born in 1970, and Timothy, born in 1979. Family life was conducted around the steady advance of the disease and, later, around the demands of Hawking's growing fame, which brought a stream of visitors, carers, students and journalists into the household.

The strain was considerable, and Jane was open about it in her own memoir, which later formed the basis of the film The Theory of Everything. Caring for Hawking became more than one person could manage, and as nursing help came into the home the marriage came under increasing pressure. Hawking and Jane separated around 1990 and divorced in 1995.

Elaine

In 1995 Hawking married Elaine Mason, one of the nurses who had been caring for him. The marriage lasted until their divorce in 2006. It was the more turbulent of the two, and was the subject of a good deal of press attention and rumour during those years; Hawking himself did not pursue the various claims that circulated, and out of respect for everyone involved this site does not repeat unverified accounts.

Reconciliation

What is clear, and more important, is that in his later years Hawking grew close again to Jane, their children and his grandchildren. The family appeared together at public occasions, including the premiere of The Theory of Everything, and Jane and the children were a steady presence around him at the end of his life. His daughter Lucy became a journalist and author, and the two collaborated on the George's Secret Key series of children's books, weaving real science into adventure stories, a warm late chapter in their relationship.

A private man in a very public life

Hawking's personal life cannot be separated from his physics, because the same disease shaped both. The condition that confined him also, by his own account, gave him uninterrupted time to think; the fame his work brought reshaped his household; and the people who cared for him made the work possible at all. He could be stubborn, mischievous and difficult, as well as brave and funny, and he did not present himself as a saint. The honest picture is of an extraordinary mind living an ordinary, complicated human life under entirely unordinary conditions.

Beyond his family, he was active in public life; see his activism and public life.