Professor Stephen Hawking had a colourful love life and was twice married. He once fell for his nurse who ‘liked to skateboard and definitely knew how to flirt’
Stephen Hawking‘s love life was almost as complicated his scientific theories. The highly acclaimed British physicist died in 2018 at the age of 76, having lived with motor neurone disease for more than 50 years.
Details about Prof Hawking’s love life have resurfaced after a photograph was released of him laying back on a sunbed with two women in bikinis either side of him. The astrophysicist and cosmologist can be seen grinning in the picture, released along with the millions of documents relating to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein by the US Department of Justice last month.
No detail is provided on the date or location of the image, though many that appear alongside it appear to have been taken on Epstein’s Little Saint James Island in the US Virgin Islands. His family has since spoken out about the image, stating that the two women in the photo were his long-term carers from the UK.
Hawking is already known to have visited Epstein’s private island in March 2006 as one of 21 prominent scientists attending a five-day physics conference focused on gravity. The visit came before Epstein had been charged with any sexual offences. Being mentioned in the files does not amount to an accusation of any wrongdoing, and Dr Hawking has never been accused of any crimes.
READ MORE: All the famous men in Epstein files and their wildly different explanationsREAD MORE: Stephen Hawking family breaks silence on photo in Epstein Files of two bikini women
Hawking was married twice during his life. He once struck up a romance with one of his nurses – who went on to become his second wife. A book by Hawking’s old friend Leonard Mlodinow – Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics – revealed details of his marriages and affairs, including the ‘fiery redhead’ he fell for.
Hawking was first married to Jane Wilde in the 1960s when the couple were both in their early 20s, and when he was first exhibiting signs of ALS. But his diagnosis took its toll on their physical love life. “[Hawking’s] condition meant that Stephen had always been a completely passive sex partner as well as a fragile one,” Mlodinow wrote.
It meant that Jane became more of a caretaker than a wife over the next three decades, and would “eventually feed him, dress him, bathe him and sit with him through his many hospital visits and near-death experiences”.
Nevertheless, the two remained married until 1985 when, after a tracheotomy, Hawking fell for his nurse, Elaine Mason, described as a fiery redhead who “liked to skateboard and definitely knew how to flirt”.
Elaine was also married at the time — her husband, David, was “an engineer and self-confessed Hawking super-fan” who also happened to have “helped develop Hawking’s speech synthesizer,” Mlodinow added.
“Maybe one reason they bonded was that she had the flamboyance he would have exhibited if he’d had the use of his body. For her part, Elaine wasn’t put off by Stephen’s physical condition. Just the opposite: she was drawn to it,” the author and pal writes.
Speaking in 2015, Jane said of her marriage: “The truth was, there were four partners in our marriage. Stephen and me, motor neurone disease and physics. If you took out motor neurone disease, you are still left with physics. Mrs. Einstein, you know, cited physics as a difference for her divorce.”
Jane grew closer platonically to a friend called Jonathan Hellyer Jones. The pair met in 1977 after joining a local church choir. He moved into the family’s Cambridge flat with Prof Hawking’s blessing, as he too wanted someone to care for his wife and kids after he died.
Although Jane and Jonathan maintained a platonic relationship for a long time, Prof Hawking reportedly grew increasingly unhappy with it. In 1990, after 26 years of marriage, he left Jane and moved into a flat with Elaine. Five years later, he divorced his first wife and married the nurse.
“This led to a new ‘new arrangement’. It was a constellation as complex as any in the night sky, encompassing Stephen, Elaine, Jane, and Jonathan; the three Hawking children; and their various interconnecting relationships,” Mlodinow writes.
Elaine told Mlodinow that she “helped Stephen” but that he also helped her. “I came from a dysfunctional family. My parents didn’t look after us very much. I loved (my ex-husband), but we weren’t in love,” she said. “I married him because I was 25 and he was the first man who asked me, and that’s what you did. So the feeling of being loved was special. And I was in love with Stephen and he was in love with me. He accepted me and loved me for who I am inside.”
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the couple. Hawking’s second marriage caused friction with his daughter Lucy and son Tim, who accused their stepmother of restricting their access. Then, in 2004, nurses caring for Prof Hawking went to police with allegations that his second wife was physically and emotionally abusing him. However, the physicist and Elaine denied the allegations and an investigation was dropped by police.
Mlodinow concluded that Elaine and Prof Hawking had a “stormy relationship”. “One moment it was: ‘You’re crazy, I hate you, and never want to see you again’; the next it was ‘I love you more than anything and could never live without you,” he writes.
When Hawking died in 2018, Elaine paid tribute to her ex-husband, while also acknowledged the difficulties in their marriage. “Stephen was like an actor. He needed to be the center of attention, the center of the universe. He loved it. It gave him energy. He loved people,” she told Mlodinow.
“He had a very tough life but he was an incredibly brave man. He never, ever complained, ever, but he needed to be the center of attention. And, yes, I probably resented that — not all the time, but when I was tired or one of the carers was flirting with him, or whatever it was,” she continued. “But it would be temporary. The resentment would pass. Deep down, he was my only love.”
The couple divorced in 2006 after he fell for another nurse, Diana King, who was 39 years younger than him. While the two did get engaged, Hawking was worried a marriage would cause more problems with his children and decided to back out.
The decision devastated King, who told Mlodinow that Hawking had “the most expensive face in the world ” and that she could tell what he was thinking at any given moment by the way his mouth twitched.
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