Meredith Hooper

Meredith Jean Hooper (née Rooney; 21 October 1939 – 27 December 2025) was an Australian historian and writer.

Meredith Jean Rooney was born and raised in Adelaide, Australia. Hooper graduated in history from the University of Adelaide, then studied imperial history at Oxford.

Hooper was a member of Association of British Science Writers and the British Society for the History of Science,^{[citation needed]} and was a visiting research fellow at the Royal Institution.

In 2000, the National Science Foundation and the Congress of the United States awarded Hooper the Antarctica Service Medal. In 2014, Hooper was named the Australian of the Year in the UK.

Meredith Hooper was the wife of British civil servant Richard Hooper and mother of film director Tom Hooper. After seeing a 2007 reading of an unproduced play, she told her son she thought he should consider pursuing it for a film adaptation; the project became his Academy Award-winning film, The King's Speech.

Hooper died on 27 December 2025, at the age of 86. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery.