Benedict Cumberbatch will take a starring role at Stephen Hawking’s memorial service in Westminster Abbey this week, when the physicist’s ashes are interred near the grave of Sir Isaac Newton.

A reading by the actor, who played the scientist in the 2004 BBC biopic Hawking, will be accompanied by others from the astronaut Major Tim Peake, Hawking’s daughter Lucy and two of his oldest scientist friends, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, and Kip Thorne, an American physicist and Nobel prizewinner.

It follows Hawking’s funeral in March, at which the tributes were led by Eddie Redmayne, the other actor to portray him. Redmayne, who won an Oscar for the 2014 biopic The Theory of Everything, read from Ecclesiastes, closing with the lines: “I have seen the