by Pam Pollack
So Jo and Neil got married in the library of their home in Perthshire, Scotland. There were only fifteen guests, including Jo’s father and his second wife. Jo had three bridesmaids: Jessica, Di, and Neil’s sister, Lorna. Jo couldn’t wait to begin this new chapter in her life.
STARS OF THE FILMS
DANIEL RADCLIFFE AS HARRY POTTER
DANIEL RADCLIFFE WAS JUST ELEVEN YEARS OLD WHEN HE WAS CAST AS HARRY POTTER. HE SOON BECAME ALMOST AS FAMOUS AS THE CHARACTER HE PLAYED. HE STARRED IN ALL EIGHT HARRY POTTER MOVIES. HE HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO BE AN ACTOR, AND HE TRIED TO LEARN AS MUCH AS HE COULD FROM THE OLDER STARS THAT PLAYED HIS TEACHERS AT HOGWARTS. WHEN HE WAS SEVENTEEN, HE STARRED IN A PLAY CALLED EQUUS. RICHARD GRIFFITHS, WHO PLAYED HARRY’S MUGGLE UNCLE, VERNON, IN THE MOVIES, WAS ALSO IN IT. IN 2011 DANIEL CAME BACK TO BROADWAY TO STAR IN HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING. NOW HE HAD TO SING AND LEARN TO SPEAK WITH AN AMERICAN ACCENT.
EMMA WATSON AS HERMIONE GRANGER
EMMA WATSON WAS BORN IN PARIS, FRANCE. WHEN SHE WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, HER FAMILY MOVED TO ENGLAND. SHE WAS NINE YEARS OLD WHEN SHE TRIED OUT FOR THE ROLE OF HERMIONE. SHE WON IT OVER THOUSANDS OF OTHER GIRLS. UNLIKE HERMIONE, EMMA IS VERY INTERESTED IN FASHION. SHE HAS APPEARED ON THE COVER OF FASHION MAGAZINES LIKE VOGUE AND ELLE. AFTER RECEIVING GOOD GRADES AT SCHOOL IN ENGLAND, EMMA MOVED TO AMERICA TO GO TO BROWN UNIVERSITY. HERMIONE WOULD BE PROUD.
RUPERT GRINT AS RON WEASLEY
RON WEASLEY IS THE SECOND YOUNGEST OF SEVEN, BUT RUPERT GRINT IS THE OLDEST OF FIVE. GROWING UP, HE WENT TO DRAMA CLASSES AND PLAYED RUMPLESTILTSKIN IN A LOCAL PLAY. BUT NOTHING COMPARED TO STARTING WORK ON THE HARRY POTTER MOVIES WHEN HE WAS TWELVE. RUPERT MADE A NUMBER OF OTHER MOVIES WHILE WORKING ON THE SERIES INCLUDING CHERRYBOMB, WHERE HE PLAYED A TOUGH CHARACTER NOT AT ALL LIKE RON.
Chapter 8
Truly Magical
Jo’s family was growing fast. In 2003, she gave birth to David Gordon Rowling Murray. Two years later, she had another daughter. Her name was Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray. While she was pregnant with Mackenzie, Jo was hard at work on the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was published when Mackenzie was seven months old. Jo dedicated the book to her “beautiful daughter.”
The Rowling-Murrays lived mostly in Scotland. Along with the house on the banks of the River Tay, they owned a seventeenth-century mansion in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh house had thirty-one rooms. It was guarded by high fences, electric gates, and closed-circuit televisions. Jo also hired a bodyguard who had served in the British Special Air Service to protect her family.
When the family went to London they stayed in their third house, which had an underground pool and twenty-four-hour security.
The Harry Potter books had made Jo very rich. She was the second highest-earning female entertainer in the world (after Oprah Winfrey). Forbes Magazine estimated her worth at over a billion dollars. The Sunday Times in England listed her as the 122nd richest person in Britain—that put her eleven places ahead of the Queen of England!
On January 11, 2007, in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, J. K. Rowling finished the last book in the Harry Potter series. In her hotel room, there was a bust of the Greek god Hermes. At the bottom of the bust, Jo wrote, “J. K. Rowling finished writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in this room (652) on 11th January 2007.”
The final book was published on July 21 that same year. So much had happened in Jo’s life since she first started thinking about the boy wizard. She had gone from a poor, single mother who didn’t have enough money to buy food to being richer than the Queen of England. She had a new husband and three children. She was famous all over the world—just like Harry Potter himself. The real King’s Cross train station in London now had a sign leading to platform 9 ¾ with a luggage cart wheeled halfway through the magical barrier. At Nicolson’s Restaurant, there was a plaque on the wall that read, “J. K. Rowling wrote some of the early chapters of Harry Potter in the rooms on the first floor of this building.”
Despite all the changes in her life, Jo hadn’t forgotten the issues that were important to her. She used her money to help the people she had always wanted to help. She volunteered and donated money to charities like Gingerbread, which helps out one-parent families, the National MS Society, which raises money to find a cure for multiple sclerosis, and Amnesty International. She even wrote books for charity. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was Harry’s Hogwarts textbook about magical animals—complete with handwritten notes from Harry, Ron, and Hermione. She also wrote Quidditch Through the Ages, a history of the magical sport Harry played. The money from the sales of these books went to Comic Relief, which fights poverty all over the world.
For an auction for Book Aid International, which sends books to children in Africa, Jo drew a family tree for all the relatives of Harry’s godfather, Sirius Black. The picture was bought by the mother of Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the movies.
The best part was knowing that children all over the world were reading her stories and loving them. Years after the last book was published, Jo was still getting hundreds of letters every day from people who loved Harry. She answered every one with the help of two secretaries.
In 2011, her fans got another surprise when Jo announced a new website, Pottermore.
Pottermore was “an online reading experience unlike any other,” where readers could participate in Harry’s story themselves. People who signed into the site could take a quiz written by Jo herself that sorted them into one of the four houses of Hogwarts. They could choose a magical pet and be chosen by a magic wand. The site was also full of extra information that Jo couldn’t find a place for in the books themselves. For instance, she filled in information on characters’ early lives before they made their appearances in the books. The site also had artwork showing scenes from the books—down to the last detail. Jo supervised everything so that it would look exactly how she imagined. Every person who entered the site entered Harry’s world. Perhaps one day some of her fans would become authors and write their own stories. For Jo Rowling, that would be truly magical.
THE INTERNET
IN THE LATE 1990S, THE BUDDING INTERNET GAVE HARRY POTTER FANS A WAY OF CONNECTING AND TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER FROM ALL CORNERS OF THE WORLD. NOW FANS HAD CHAT ROOMS AND MESSAGE BOARDS. FANS CREATED WEBSITES ABOUT THEIR FAVORITE CHARACTERS. JO HERSELF SOMETIMES CHECKED THE FAN-CREATED HARRY POTTER LEXICON SITE, WHICH CATALOGUED EVERYTHING IN THE BOOKS FOR EASY REFERENCE. OTHER SITES LIKE FICTIONALLEY, MUGGLENET, AND THE LEAKY CAULDRON GAVE FANS A PLACE TO SHARE THEIR OWN ARTWORK AND STORIES ABOUT THE HARRY POTTER CHARACTERS. USING THE INTERNET, FANS WERE ALSO ABLE TO PLAN CONVENTIONS LIKE NIMBUS, PHOENIX RISING, AND SECTUS, WHERE THEY MET IN DIFFERENT CITIES TO TALK ABOUT HARRY POTTER.
However much her life had changed, Jo was still a writer. Each day her husband went to work as a doctor. Jo fed David and Mackenzie and went to her small office in her house in Edinburgh to write. At lunchtime she made herself a sandwich. Then she returned to writing until Jessica came home from school.
But what was Jo writing? That’s what everyone wanted to know, and she wasn’t telling. “I think I always felt I didn’t want to publish again until the last film was out because Potter has been such a huge thing in my life,” she told BBC News. “I’ve been writing hard ever since I finished writing Hallows, so I’ve got a lot of stuff and I suppose it’s a question of deciding which one comes out first. But I will publish again. In a sense it’s a beginning for me as well as an end.”
Then, in February 2012, word was out. Little, Brown Book Group, a publishing company in the United Kingdom, announced a new book by J. K. Rowling. It was for grown-ups, not children. Jo said the new book will be “very different to the Harry Potter series, although I’ve enjoyed writing it every bit as much.” She didn’t give any details about the story, but Jo had already decided that it would not be about magic. “I think I’ve done my fantasy,” Jo said. “To go and create another f
antasy universe would feel wrong, and I don’t know if I’m capable of it.”
Jo might have finished writing Harry Potter, but chances are that kids will continue to read about him for generations to come. Harry’s world of dragons, castles, and magic wands is truly timeless. Perhaps one day he will take his place among other classic children’s book characters like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, with his story read by children of all ages forever.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The Harry Potter Economy,” The Economist, December 19, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/15108711.
“JK Rowling, Learning To Live With Fame, Fortune and Life Without Harry,” The Independent, July 8, 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/jk-rowling-learning-to-live-with-fame-fortune-and-life-without-harry-456091.html.
DanRadcliffe.com. “Biography.” http://www.danradcliffe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16. Accessed August 1, 2011.
Emma Watson Official Site. “Life & Emma.” http://www.emmawatson.com/en/Emma/About/. Accessed August 1, 2011.
J. K. Rowling Official Site. “Biography.” http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/biography.cfm. Accessed August 1, 2011.
Nel, Phil. J K Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001.
Rowling, J. K. “The Not Especially Fascinating Life So Far of J. K. Rowling.” http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1998/autobiography.html. Accessed August 1, 2011.
Vos MacDonald, Joan. J. K. Rowling: Banned, Challenged, and Censored. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2008.
The Worldwide Home for Rupert Grint Fans. “Rupert Grint: Biography.” . Accessed August 1, 2011.
