When JK Rowling struck her fatal blow against Emma Watson this week – she has “so little experience of real life, she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is” – a heavy door shuddered on the feud between the Harry Potter actor and the author who created her. Joanna, 60, sparked fury when she denounced trans activism, declaring that it eroded the concept of biological sex. She demanded protection of women’s rights. Her entitled-generation critics flared. Rowling was attacked not only by LGBTQ+ groups but by the privileged young stars she had nurtured.
The eight films based on her novels made ‘Hermione Granger’ Watson, now 35, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint multi-millionaires by their early teens. Did they owe her loyalty, support and discretion despite their differing opinions? Of course they did. I rewound to a West Hollywood day in the early nineties when I was waiting to interview John Travolta. My firstborn Mia was larking in the pool. I was suddenly aware of a top studio casting agent striding towards me.
“Drop your typewriter in the toilet, you are sitting on a million dollars. That,” he said, gesturing at Mia, “is as cute as cute gets. We’re talking Macaulay Culkin’s little English cousin in Home Alone 3. Adorable sidekick in Billy Connolly’s new series. There are pictures in the pipe she’d walk away with: Mrs Doubtfire. Miracle on 34th Street. Matilda. We’ve been watching her. She is it.”
He tossed me his card. “Call me. Let’s get her in for a screen test.”
When Hollywood knocked, we could have done with it. Like JK, I was a single mother, grafting around the clock between London, New York and LA Living out of a carry-on with a small child under one arm. Mia was a Disney Snow White: coal-black hair, vanilla skin, Bambi eyes.
But I was a hack who had gone beyond the footlights. I’d seen what lurked there. I thought of Drew Barrymore, who starred in E.T. at seven and was smoking and drinking by the age of nine.
Of Tatum O’Neal, Oscar-winning star of Paper Moon, who dated Michael Jackson, became a cocaine addict, married John McEnroe and lost her kids. Of tragic River Phoenix, who shared Mia’s birthday. A star at 13, he was dead ten years later, having overdosed on heroin and cocaine.
I called the casting director and declined. “Big deal!” he screamed. “You screw up the kid, you’ll have the money to pay for the therapists.”
When a child lives a backlot life of 4am make-up calls, 12-hour shoots, script clinics, wardrobe fittings and publicity campaigns, they are inclined to lose their grip on reality.
Emma Watson’s problem, for all her scholarly intelligence, is a kind of arrested development. As JK points out, thanks to her fortune and privileges, she will never know what it is to be a real woman in an all-too-real world.