Poor old Harry Potter. As if being orphaned by a monomaniacal necromancer and forced to grow up in a cupboard under the stairs wasn’t bad enough, it has now been revealed that the Boy Who Lived spent his formative years in Bracknell.
A three-bedroom house used to film the first Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is on sale for £475,000. Situated in Martins Heron, a suburb of the town named the fourth ugliest in the UK in 2013, the house doubled for 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging in the Potter film saga.
If you don’t fancy a future sweeping keen Potter fans off your doorstep in the Berkshire suburbs, here are some other properties recently on sale that you might recognise from the movies.
The ‘horse’s head’ mansion in The Godfather
Known as the Beverly House, this 30-bedroom, 40-bathroom estate, previously owned by William Randolph Hearst, doubled as the mansion where stubborn movie producer Jack Woltz awoke to discover his equine bedfellow in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 mob epic. Just a few blocks from gilded Sunset Boulevard, the mansion also featured in The Bodyguard, and has hosted parties for Rihanna and Prince Albert of Monaco. Currently up for sale, the six-acre estate, which features a 50,000sq ft main house and cascading waterfalls down to an ornate swimming pool, is expected to cost its eventual purchaser upwards of $175m (£135m).
Julie Christie’s home in Far from the Madding Crowd
On sale in 2013 for £4m, Bloxworth House in Dorset featured as the home of vivacious landowner and proto-feminist Bathsheba Everdeen in John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation of the 1874 Thomas Hardy novel. The Grade I-listed manor house, set in eight acres of “magnificent parkland”, has eight bedrooms, a walled garden, a three-bedroom “staff cottage”, wine cellars, a swimming pool and a tennis court.
Buffalo Bill’s home in Silence of the Lambs
This Pennsylvanian property may not have a “murder dungeon” in the basement, but it was used to shoot interior and exterior scenes in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning 1991 film. In summer 2015, Scott and Barbara Lloyd were asking $300,000 for the three-storey 19th-century house in Layton, Fayette county. They dropped the asking price to $250,000 that December, and sold it in July 2016 for $195,000.
Glenn Close and Kevin Kline’s summer home from The Big Chill
The antebellum-era house in South Carolina where Glenn Close and Kevin Kline’s old college friends gather in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 film, sold for $2.78m (£2.14m) in April this year. The Star Wars screenwriter Kasdan reputedly spotted the five-bedroom property, which features wraparound porches on two levels, in the 1979 film The Great Santini. Most of The Big Chill, including the famous kitchen dancing scene, was shot here.
Cameron Frye’s home in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Fancy smashing up your dad’s expensive red Ferrari in a symbolic act of rebellion against parental tyranny? The fancy glass-fronted house featured in John Hughes’ 1986 comedy was sold in 2014 for $1.06m. Located in Highland Park, Illinois, not far from Chicago, the pop-culture landmark was reduced from the original asking price of $2.3m in 2009, but failed to sell for five years.
The Sleepless in Seattle houseboat
Tom Hanks’s 2,700sq feet waterfront bolthole, in Nora Ephron’s schmaltzy 1992 romance, has four bedrooms and mooring for a small yacht on Seattle’s Lake Union. It was sold for $2.5m in 2014 to a water-loving executive in the local high-tech industry, who planned to use it as a summer holiday home.
The Beverly Hills Cop shootout mansion
The bloody denouement of Martin Brest’s 1984 action comedy, in which Eddie Murphy’s street-smart Detroit cop takes down evil Steven Berkoff’s narcotics empire, was filmed at an eight-bedroom Mediterranean-style mansion in southern California. Featuring a prohibition-era wet bar hidden behind a false wall, the 1932 property is set in three acres of lushly landscaped grounds and was on sale last year for $23m. There’s only one catch: despite the kind of price tag that only modern day Pablo Escobars might be able to afford, it’s not actually in Beverly Hills, being located on the border of Pacific Palisades and Santa Monica.
