Please kill me off, begs Harry Potter star
It wasn't a question of horsing around when Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe took to the London stage in all his glory. The 17-year-old truly impressed with a bravura full-frontal display that earned him a standing ovation.
For his first leading role in the West End, Radcliffe chose Peter Shaffer's 34-year-old play Equus, where he plays a stable boy being treated by a psychiatrist for blinding six horses with a hoof pick.
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The new performance comes as Radcliffe says he hopes the boy wizard dies in the seventh and last book of the series.
Author Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is published on July 21 and will, inevitably, be filmed.
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And Daniel, 17, who gains access to his £20 million film earnings on his 18th birthday on July 23, says: "I sort of hope I'll die in it.
J.K. Rowling, as fans know her from her 300-million-selling series, has said two of her main characters will die in the last book.
And Daniel, along with millions of fans, wonders if Harry's fate is intertwined with evil arch enemy, Lord Voldemort. "Maybe one can only die if the other does," he says.
Ms Rowling, 41, whose share of the £2.5 billion Potter franchise is put at £750 million, may wish to eliminate Harry to prevent him appearing in other people's books and being marketed in ways she would not approve of.
She has said: "I can completely understand an author who thinks, 'Well, I'm going to kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels'."
Of the two deaths in the final chapter, she says: "A price has to be paid. We are dealing with pure evil. They go for the main characters."
