A legendary cosmologist, Hawking was best known for his work on black holes. In 1988, he penned the bestseller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, which is now regarded the foremost authority on gravity and the cosmos. Hawking suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease and used a speech synthesizer to communicate. (His only gripe with the computer that allowed him to speak, the Times reports, was that it gave him an American accent.) In 2014, director James Marsh adapted the story of Hawking and his wife Jane Hawking into a movie titled The Theory of Everything. Eddie Redmayne earned an Oscar for his portrayal of Hawking.