The hit stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, was developed by the producer Sonia Friedman with a storyline intended to show how a child copes without parents.
Friedman reveals today how her own father left home a few months before she was born and she saw him only about once a year for the rest of his life. Her father Leonard Friedman, a violinist, never told her he loved her or bought her a birthday or Christmas present.
As Potter fans know, Harry’s parents were murdered by the dark wizard Lord Voldemort when he was a baby, leaving him to grow up with his horrible aunt and her family.
On today’s Desert Island Discs, Friedman says: “I never really had a dad, which is what has formed what I am. I had no relationship with him. I never even got birthday or Christmas presents from him. Yet I don’t blame him as he had a difficult childhood and life himself, simply being told to get on with his music.
“He died in 1994 and just before that I had an urge to see him. We had a meal together and I can recall that he turned to me and said that he was very proud of me.”
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Clearly fighting back tears, Friedman, 52, adds: “But he never said ‘I love you’.”
She says she envisaged the Harry Potter play to be “about loss” because of her own circumstances.
“I’ve never understood what it was like having a dad,” Friedman says.
As a result of this she says the character of the young, orphaned Potter resonated powerfully with her. “So I’m always looking for stories about a dad,” she tells the flagship Radio 4 programme.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was written by Jack Thorne and opened to rave reviews last July. It won a record-breaking nine Olivier awards, the most prestigious theatre prizes, in April.
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At the Stage awards in January, Friedman was named producer of the year for the third consecutive year. Her other recent hits have included The Ferryman, Dreamgirls and a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
She says she has been “content” with the choice of not having children, which means she can “work at 2am, 4am or 8am, which I could not do if I was at home cooking for my family”.
She admits she was “aware of a gap in my life. Yet I can’t regret anything. So I’m evaluating my life now and yet I fill it with more shows”.