Deified might be an extreme way of putting it but Mr. Hawking once attended my university to give what looked like a fairly ordinary physics lecture, and not only was the room full to a brim, three other rooms where the lecture was projected were, and people were sitting outside on the grass and watching it on a projector.
If another physics professor of similar caliber had given the lecture I can tell you they would have had trouble to attract a few dozen people.
He undoubtedly was a major celebrity, which I guess in our modern secular times is somewhat like deification. I mean at that time you wouldn't have been able to tell the uni campus apart from a new age cult event. There were people intently listening to the lecture who I know for a fact had not the slightest idea what he was even talking about and just soaking it in like if they were listening to some preacher reciting ancient scripture.
This mystification of science which Hawking stood for always reminds me of a Ted Chiang short story: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679