This Much Is True

A few days later, Lindy rang in great excitement to tell me that I’d got the part of Pomona Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. She was cock-a-hoop. I always want to know about the money. It was £60,000, with residual payments according to the American Screen Actors Guild agreement. This was important, because it carries medical insurance with it and, at my age, I was mindful of the cost of treatment if you didn’t use the NHS.

Production started on 19 November 2001 — only three days after the general release of the first Harry Potter film, which had been a huge success. It was filmed mostly in the cavernous Warner Bros. Studios, Leavesden, a converted aircraft factory and airfield just outside Watford, where they had built all the colossal sets, from the impressive Great Hall that could seat more than four hundred children, to the Dickensian Diagon Alley, home to Gringotts Bank and Ollivanders wand shop, where Harry’s wand chose him.

We also went on location to shoot scenes: to the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, and to Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, which is actually Hogwarts (and was also home to the ‘Black Adder’ himself, Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh). Location is fun. They put me, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, Kenneth Branagh and Warwick Davis in the same lovely hotel. At the end of a long, often freezing-cold day’s filming, Richard Harris liked to be welcomed by a roaring fire in an open grate, so the hotel staff had to keep it blazing all day because no one knew what time we might finish. And Maggie Smith got the room with the four-poster bed but she thoroughly deserved it. On the first morning, when I came down to breakfast, Richard Harris was having his toast and marmalade at another table with Maggie Smith. I said to him, brightly, ‘Good morning,’ and he growled, ‘Fuck off.’ I later found out that he had leukaemia, but I didn’t know that then, and I was quite offended. I kept myself to myself after that, at least where Dumbledore was concerned.

My memory of the whole experience comes in flashes of scenes and moments. In one scene we had to play Quidditch; a bizarre experience, because it was all done on ‘green screen’. We had to stand stock still by a pole against a green background. We each had a number, and when somebody called your number, you had to make a gesture of some kind, as if the elusive and darting Golden Snitch was right there at the end of your nose. I was decidedly non-committal about Quidditch, the sport didn’t make my blood race at all. I remember determinedly swiping with my Quidditch stick at an imaginary Golden Snitch and becoming quite red in the face and sweaty with my exertions. Funnily enough, my next door neighbour is the president of the UK Quidditch Society. He’s nuts about the game, but I can’t get the hang of it at all.

The fun part of it, of course, was talking to the other actors when we weren’t on camera. As the cast list was a roll call of the British acting elite, it was exciting to see who was on set each day, and to say hello to everyone and have a chance to catch up with old friends, like Julie Walters and David Bradley and Robbie Coltrane, at lunch. It was always a little scary to be working with Maggie Smith. I am very fond of her, but her reputation is justified; she is a great actress with a distinguished career, she loves to laugh and she’s deliciously witty, funny and jokey, but there is that other side to her, which is biting. The stories are legendary. When one night Laurence Olivier criticised her vowel purity, she riposted the next evening looking pointedly at his blackface Othello make-up, enunciating with punishing clarity: ‘How Now Brown Cow’; and when asked if she’d like to see Fiona Shaw as Richard II she said, ‘I’d rather drink ink.’ Luckily Maggie and I got on. Sometimes she would say, ‘Oh, come and sit with me, Miriam, I’m bored.’ I would go and sit with her and we would talk and laugh. She also had a much nicer trailer than I did.

I can’t say if Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane or Alan Rickman felt similarly underwhelmed by Harry Potter, but even if the main actors didn’t consider these the greatest works of literature in the world, they took the work seriously. They’re rattling good stories. Even if they didn’t lift cinema into another sphere, they were unbelievably popular, which is something that we actors respect. The law of the box office is the first law of the movie industry.