Harry Potter curse helps Emma’s mother get her gargoyles back
WHEN Emma Thompson played divination professor Sybil Trelawney in Harry Potter, some of the magic may have rubbed off.
For her mother, the actress Phyllida Law, 77, turned to a little witchery when two prized stone gargoyles were stolen from her garden wall.
She stuck up a picture of herself dressed as the “Neighbourhood Witch” and posted a joke sign on her shrubs warning a “curse” would be put on the thief.
Now, much to her surprise, the hocus-pocus seems to have worked … after more than two years, the statues have suddenly reappeared.
Spookily, they arrived with a handwritten note begging: “Help me please. I have been very, very ill since I stole these. Please lift the curse.”
Phyllida said: “It was a complete jokey notice. You wouldn’t think he’d take it seriously at all.
“But his guilt was so great.”
The gargoyles, which had pride of place on a wall outside her home in West Hampstead, London, were swiped in August 2007.
They had been a favourite with children, who used to stop and talk to them on their way home from school.
That’s why she posted the sign reading: “Be so kind as to return the children’s stone statues – otherwise curses will occur!
“You have been warned!”
She added a photograph of herself dressed up as a hook-nosed witch, which had been taken one Hallowe’en, in a mock-up of the Neighbourhood Watch sign.
Last weekend, a large, black rucksack appeared outside her front door, containing a note on lined paper, to “the householder”.
Phyllida said: “It is the most fantastic story. A very good black rucksack was put outside my door. It stayed there for 48 hours until I thought it’s so heavy, what can be in it? Probably bombs.
“So I gingerly opened the lid and it was the two gargoyles. Tucked in the pocket was the little note.”
The actress, whose daughter Emma lives across the road with husband Greg Wise, says: “I’m worried about the person now being very, very ill.
“It was a joke because of the kids, and me being a witch at Hallowe’en.”
Phyllida has had a new sign printed and displayed, along with the rucksack, dry cleaned and hanging from a tree for its owner to reclaim.
It reads: “Thank you for returning the children’s statues. All curses have been lifted. Hurrah.”
Phyllida was married to Eric Thompson, narrator of The Magic Roundabout. He died in 1982.
Her first book, Notes To My Mother-In-Law, will be released next month.