Hawking: Can You Hear Me? review – a startling, harrowing look at Stephen’s secret life

This intimate portrait of genius physicist Stephen Hawking shows the true toll of his physical decline on his family, via revealing interviews with his first wife and children

The brief history of Stephen Hawking is one we all know. Diagnosed at the age of 21 with motor neurone disease and given three years to live, he went on to marry his sweetheart Jane, have three children and become - despite increasingly severe disability and many health crises - a groundbreaking physicist and cosmologist. He was also a member of the Royal Society, the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge (a seat once held by Newton) and a world-famous author and lionised public figure after writing the bestselling A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018 at the age of 76.

You could easily fill a documentary with stories of his genius. What Hawking: Can You Hear Me? (Sky Documentaries) did was take on the trickier task of illuminating the man and examining what it took, from him and all those around this hyper-focused, hyper-competitive mind, to accomplish all that he did.