25.01.15 / 3
GILES KEYTE/S.B. NACE/ED MILLER/BBC
Aikman can tell that Redmayne put in hours of research for his Oscar-nominated performance as Hawking
I’ve seen my terminal
decline in fast forward
Why Eddie Redmayne’s superb
portrayal of Stephen Hawking in
The Theory of Everything proved to
be painful but essential viewing
I
comes the prospective mistress. French
clothes, French style, brittle wit: Anne
Boleyn. Not a beauty, but piquant
enough to make Henry overturn, for her
sake, the religious and political order of
Europe.
Anne would not go to bed with him;
she held out for marriage and the
throne. She wanted status and power.
Imagine Anne in the boardroom.
Imagine Anne on the doorstep at 10
Downing Street. She is endlessly translatable, in her sinuous glamour, sliding
through time and space. You would not
see her in the street or the supermarket
queue, but dimly through plate glass, in
the gilded foyer of an upmarket hotel, or
whisking through fast-track at the airport, her glance passing through people
as if she were an x-ray machine. Can I
use you? If not, step out of my way.
But three years on, she will be disillu-
Mary Rylance
as Thomas
Cromwell with
Claire Foy as
Anne Boleyn
over playing Plain Jane
in the final 10 minutes or so along with
Damian Lewis as a non-fat Henry VIII.
We will see more of her in the coming
weeks.
“I was only on for five seconds,”
says Phillips, “but it was nail-biting.
My brother told me I went red.” They
live in Hackney, east London, where
he is a tutor and writer; their eldest
brother works for a telecoms
company.
Appropriately enough, Phillips
spent her first nine years in Esher,
Surrey, near Hampton Court and the
Cardinal Wolseley pub. Her parents
divorced when she was six and she
was raised by her mother and
stepfather, who worked in the wine
trade. They moved a lot: Nottingham,
Bristol, London.
“I found it hard —always the new
girl. Some people are good at making
friends immediately. I wasn’t.”
Would it be a stretch to say that was
why you became an actor, I ask. “No: I
genuinely think it was the reason. It
wasn’t cool to push to be in plays
when no one knew who you were,
but I felt that I belonged when I was
part of that community. I’ve always
found it difficult to articulate myself —
when I’ve got a script, I’m happy. I
feel like I don’t really know who I am
at any one time.”
Lots of actors are like that, I say.
MARK BOURDILLON
Kate Phillips
says her brief
appearance in
the first
episode of
Wolf Hall was
‘nail-biting’
“Lots of people are,” she says. They
don’t really know themselves.
“I never had a boyfriend at school,”
she continues. “Oh God, I can’t tell
you this. The first time I was kissed
was during a school production of
Romeo and Juliet. In front of my
drama teacher. I was 16. The boy from
the boys’ school kissed me and” — she
does an ironic fist pump — “I thought,
yeah! I’m a woman now.”
It must be at once thrilling and
terrifying to have success, money and
fame so close. Amid the fizzing
enthusiasm and starstruck humility, I
sense in Phillips a great sigh of relief.
sioned. And she will fail. When she too
gives birth to a daughter, then two dead
children, she is forced to a harsh realisation. She thought she would help Henry
rule, that he wanted her for her sharp
brain, her personality. It turns out he
wantedtorentherwomb.Andnowhere
comes another womb ... carried in the
body of a woman no one has noticed,
but who, standing in the shadows, has
noticed everything. They say it now,
and they said it then: a man who marries
his mistress creates a job vacancy.
Youknowthesewomen,inyour21stcentury life. Katharine, Anne, Jane
Seymour: if you do not know Jane,
beware, for she knows you. And around
the king and his women the courtiers
flutter and the ministers glide, each one
with a story stranger and more familiar
than you can easily grasp. Cardinal
Wolsey in flamboyant scarlet, the suave
diplomat with an endless appetite for
work and fame. Thomas Cromwell in
dead black, small, sharp eyes on life’s
prizes: a man whose past no one knows.
We recognise them too, though the
people who govern us now seem safe,
colourless, bloodless. Politics was a
grievous business, when a mistake
meant not retirement to the back
benches, but the loss of your head.
We can still tread Tudor ground, their
palaces and parks. Enough is left (gemstone and glass, paper and ink) for us to
understand the surface and texture of
their lives, but what remains most vividly is human, and hidden in the heart:
impulses of joy and gladness, the dragging pain of loss, and fear .. . fear of
ageing, of loss of potency ... fear of
sudden death, fear of judgment.
We do not, most of us, share the
Tudors’ belief in immortality, but we
understand their savage impulse to
wring whatever we can from short,
dangerous lives. It is not that they offer
us an escape, but that they take us to the
centre of ourselves, our own needs and
secret wishes, our own pleasures and
torments. Their concerns are more
urgent, the stakes higher; we hold up a
mirror and glimpse them scorching
through our own grey days, faster than
we are, fiery in scarlet and gold.
THE MOTOR
NEURONE DIARIES
t’s called motor neurone
disease. Life expectancy is two
years.” Watching Eddie Redmayne
in the cinematic retelling of
Stephen Hawking’s life, I am
instantly transported to the
moment I received my own
death sentence.
That day in June last year will
never leave me. I vividly remember
the pain in the doctor’s eyes as he
told me, at just 29 years old, that
my time was almost up. Nothing
can prepare you for it.
Motor neurone disease is a
progressive condition that
attacks the nerves, weakening the
muscles, which gradually waste
away. It affects about 5,000 people
in the UK at any given time.
I am constantly adapting to a
new normal: developing
workarounds and increasingly
depending on others as my body
fails. Seven months in, it has
already affected the way I walk,
talk, eat and breathe. So when a
film was made about the world’s
most famous MND patient, I had to
go see it — even though I knew it
would be a painful watch.
The theoretical physicist was
diagnosed in 1963. For me, that
same conversation happened
more than five decades later. The
old-fashioned hospital ward and
seemingly primitive medical tests
performed on Hawking felt a
million miles from the modern
NHS I have experienced. But the
words that came out of our
doctors’ mouths were almost
identical. Half a century on, there
is still no cure. No answer as to
why some of us develop MND. No
explanation as to why it kills half
of those get it within 14 months
while rare exceptions such as
Hawking live on.
The Theory of Everything charts
the professor’s life and loves. His
experience of MND is eerily
similar to my own; the parallels are
constant. A mug slides out of his
hand and hot coffee splashes across
a desk. I constantly drop, spill and
break things as I lose control of
my hands. Hawking’s handwriting
becomes increasingly shaky. Mine
is now illegible. In one scene, he
GORDON AIKMAN
slips, crashing to the ground. I
have lost count of how many times
I have fallen. My body: littered
with cuts and bruises. Months ago
I would run to the gym, soon I will
be in a wheelchair.
In another scene, Redmayne sits
naked in a bathtub staring at his
arms as his muscles twitch. I know
that feeling well. As I came to
terms with my diagnosis, I caught
myself staring at my skin as my
muscles flickered — painless but
incessant. I would lie awake at
night and feel as though my body
were tormenting me. Powerless to
the force overtaking me, I am
trapped inside as my body shuts
down around me.
Although the film depicts the
disease with remarkable accuracy,
I have lost count of
how many times I
have fallen. My
body: littered with
cuts and bruises
as someone who lives a similar life
every day, much of it seemed
painfully mundane. The reality
of that terminal, degenerative
existence is far messier than
seen on screen. Disability is
rarely dignified. Yet Redmayne
has clearly put the hours in,
researching the condition and
observing those dying from it. It is
little wonder that when Hawking
watched the film, he said: “At
times, I thought he was me.”
At times I felt I was watching
my life in fast forward. The film
forced me to confront my biggest
fears. Perhaps the cruellest aspect
of MND is that it can rob you of
your voice. More than 80% of
people experience loss of speech
before they die. Imagine being
unable to say the words “I love
you”, or the vulnerability of being
unable to cry for help. It is in our
dying days we need our voices
more than ever: to say the things
we have always planned, to
conclude relationships and make
decisions about the end of life.
When I was diagnosed, I had not
heard of motor neurone disease.
“That doesn’t sound good,” was
my awkward but honest response.
Together with the ice bucket
challenge, The Theory of
Everything has sent awareness of
MND soaring higher than ever.
That is great. The risk is people
think Hawking’s long life is the
norm. It is not. He is the exception,
not the rule. Most people with
MND die — and fast. Within
months, not decades. And yet
nobody knows why. We must
find the answer.
As Hawking reminds us:
“However bad life may seem,
where there is life, there is hope.”
And while I am alive I will fight
to fund that hope. For future
generations, hope comes in the
shape of test tubes, stem cells
and white coats.
Why — 50 years on — are we
so far from a cure? The missing
ingredient is money. That is why,
in the run-up to the general
election, I will be lobbying all
political parties to commit to
double MND research funding so
we can find a cure to this horrific
disease. Surely a world free from
MND is something all our
politicians can agree on? Now, let’s
get on with it. The clock is ticking.
! To donate to Gordon’s Fightback
text MNDS85 £10 to 70070 or visit:
justgiving.com/gordonaikman.
For more on Gordon’s campaign
visit gordonsfightback.com or
follow @gordonaikman on Twitter.
Gordon Aikman is an MND
patient and campaigner,
former Labour party strategist and
director of research for the
Better Together campaign
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