Les Misérables star Eddie Redmayne is tipped to play the physicist Stephen Hawking in a new biopic titled Theory of Everything, reports Deadline.
James Marsh, the British Oscar-winning director of documentary Man on Wire who made waves in the dramatic arena with last year's taut Troubles thriller Shadow Dancer, looks set to take charge. Redmayne is being courted by production company Working Title after his standout turn in Les Misérables, which followed impressive outings in My Week with Marilyn in 2011 and the TV war drama Birdsong last year.
The best-known biopic of the scientist to date is the BBC's 2004 TV film Hawking, which centred on his time at Cambridge in the early 60s and starred a Bafta-nominated Benedict Cumberbatch. Deadline compares Theory of Everything to films such as Jim Sheridan's My Left Foot and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, suggesting it could cover later periods in Hawking's life, as he begins to suffer the debilitating effects of motor neurone disease.
The British physicist, now 71, was diagnosed with the condition in 1962 at the age of 21 and given just two years to live by doctors.
