Entertainment

‘Til dawn do us part?

With “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 2” out this week, it’s nearing time to say goodbye to everyone’s favorite tormented Tinseltown duo, Edward and Kristen — er, Robert and Bella. Yeah, the vampires, not the actors. Um, you know what we mean.

Together, Robert Pattinson, 26, and Kristen Stewart, 22, have spawned a Frankenstein’s monster of celebrity love — birthed in young-adult fiction, urged on by rabid fans and paparazzi, fueled by 20something whims and unraveled equally quickly by good old-fashioned hormones.

Ever since the first movie in 2008, the line between fiction and reality has increasingly blurred as Robsten — the Web’s favorite contraction of Robert and Kristen — became indistinguishable from their roles as chivalrous vampire Edward Cullen and awkward teen Bella Swan. But the end of the vampire story — and, possibly, of Robsten’s — has yielded new heights of melodrama.

In “Breaking Dawn 2,” new mother Bella becomes a vampire, and the couple and their sidekicks face off against an angry army of vampires over a misunderstanding regarding Renesmee, her child with Edward.

In real life, Stewart became a cheater and the couple spent the summer facing an angry army of Twihards who took Stewart’s unfaithfulness with her “Snow White and the Huntsman” director Rupert Sanders as a very personal blow.

“I can’t believe she would do this,” sobbed uber-fan NuttyMadam in an emotional YouTube reaction to the cheating news. “She’s released a statement saying she’s sorry — like that makes it OK! I’m so, so not OK with this!”

On Twitter, fans raged. “I want this nightmare to end,” wrote @twilightwhispers. “One second I’m happy, smiling, then it hits me, I’m gonna throw up, I feel sick,” wrote @unbroken Kristen.

It’s all part of the symbiotic fan relationship that’s made “Twilight” such a huge success — more than $2.5 billion in worldwide ticket sales for the first four films — and Stewart and Pattinson household names.

“The fans project romance onto these characters — they often interchangeably use ‘Rob’ and ‘Edward’ without even realizing it,” says Jennifer Aubrey, author of “Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise.” “There are fascinating YouTube mashups where people edit together footage from the films and from the stars’ appearances and publicity shoots, set to this soaring romantic music,” Aubrey adds. “Seeing Kristen and Rob have a real romantic relationship is the ultimate realization of this fantasy.”

And, by association, seeing them split up this summer was the ultimate bummer. But, conveniently, the actors have managed to patch things up just in time to promote the last film. Is theirs a swoony tale of true love? A workplace romance of convenience? Or just the fauxmantic continuation of a really killer marketing scheme?

Stewart, for one, hasn’t cleared up the confusion: “I’m going to just let people watch whatever movie they think our lives are,” she told the “Today” show. “Keep ’em guessing, I always say.”

When Pattinson describes playing Edward, he sounds like he’s speaking about himself: “It’s a strange part because a lot of the audience projects their idea of Edward onto him,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what he is. They want him to be a certain way.”

When the couple were first cast as “Twilight” leads, he was a 21-year-old Brit actor best known for a smallish part in a Harry Potter movie. She was a 17-year-old Hollywood kid, daughter of a TV producer dad and script supervisor mom, who’d appeared with Jodi Foster in 2002’s “Panic Room” and attracted attention for a brief role in Sean Penn’s 2007 film “Into the Wild.”

Their chemistry was palpable to director Catherine Hardwicke, who told Elle magazine she “felt the sparks” between the two right away, but warned Pattinson, “She’s underage, don’t even think about it! It’s a law in our country.”

The blend of reel and real has inspired four years of obsession about the couple. On-set gossip and mildly suggestive paparazzi shots became the steady diet of Twihards everywhere. The appetite only increased with each subsequent sequel.

In short order, co-stars Pattinson and Stewart were, seemingly, falling in love. Rumors swirled after the second movie, but Stewart initially denied them.

“Rob and I are good friends. We went through a lot together,” she told Nylon magazine. “It’s only natural that we’re sort of leaning on each other, because we’re put in the most . . . psychotic situations.”

Part of that psychosis was a mass determination, on the part of Twihards, that the real-life story of Kristen and Robert must mirror that of Bella and Edward. Fans, photographers and gossips all waited for a sign, which finally arrived in early 2009:

“Good news, Twi-hards: Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are maybe, kind of, possibly one tiny step closer to becoming a real-life couple,” read one typically excited report.

Confirmation came later that year, when they were snapped making out at a Kings of Leon concert in Canada, to the delirium of Twihards.

It’s a love story as old as p.r.

“In the 1940s Hollywood system, this is what they would do with movie stars,” says Kerry Ferris, author of “Stargazing: Celebrity, Fame, and Social Interaction.” “The studio would try to make connections between the real lives of actors and the roles they were playing. It was part of [the actors’] contracts to participate.”

Robsten never expected the franchise to take over their lives. “As an actor, I think it’s scary,” Pattinson says. “You really, really feel like you have no control. It’s a huge juggernaut, especially when something becomes part of the cultural landscape as well.”

Stewart recalls one of her first encounters with the Twilight fan base: “Comic Con for me was the first time I was ever hit with a wave of human energy that was like, this is not a normal movie,” she says.

So who better to cling to in the midst of the (often literally) screaming “Twilight” chaos than each other?

“There was a very deliberate publicity machine around ‘Twilight’ placing these actors in situations where fans [could] project their characters onto them,” says Aubrey. “They would do these mall appearances where young girls would scream at them.”

By August of 2010, the couple were shacked up in a rented Bel-Air mansion. The next year, both gave interviews that were coy but clear about their status. And in Frebruary, Robsten — along with her cat, Max, and his dog, Bear — moved into a $6 million home Pattinson bought in the Los Feliz neighborhood of LA.

Then came Stewart’s legendary indiscretion in June, which neatly dovetailed with her character’s transformation into a superhuman monster.

“It’s just a more realized version of who [Bella] has been the entire time,” Stewart says. “It really does represent that stage of life where you are bubbling over with something that maybe you can’t put your finger on. And [she’s] the type to not ignore those feelings and find out why they’re there.”

Despite the seeming reunion of the couple, many have theorized that the cheating was a stunt itself, cooked up to hype the film, or ease fans into the idea that Robsten is not Edward and Bella.

“I would imagine that it’s hard for actors to feel like they’re meeting the needs of the fans and still be able to move into other roles,” Ferris says. “Eventually, there will be an end.”

Or will there? Perhaps Robsten will live on forever, totally get married and have babies, fulfilling Twihard fan fantasties.

“I don’t know whether there’s any sort of Twilight conventioneering, like with ‘Star Trek’ and soap operas,” Ferris says. “It’ll be interesting to see if Stewart and Pattinson would want to commit to doing that.”

Q&A: Robert Pattinson

On first meeting Kristen Stewart and being trapped in the ‘Twilight’ franchise

If you could go back five years, what advice would you give yourself?

Start drinking vodka instead of beer. (Laughs.) It’s fun to deal with the terror and the huge highs and lows of things. I remember, with the third movie, when we went to Munich and the entire Olympic stadium was filled with fans. Kristen [Stewart] and Taylor [Lautner] and I stood in the middle of the Olympic stadium with 30,000 people just screaming for 15 minutes. It’s absolutely bizarre!

What were your first impressions of Stewart and Lautner, in the beginning?

I met Taylor on the movie, I think, when he was wearing his wig and stuff. I met Kristen at the audition . . . And I was starstruck . . . even though I’d only seen [her] in a few things.

Is there any moment of the experience you would like to relive?

The whole first movie was pretty fun. I had never really done a movie like it, when there’s such a big cast of people that are around the same age. None of us were really known then, as well. It felt like a big deal, at the time.

At the end of the day, are you glad this is all over?

In some ways. After the first one, people started referring to it as a franchise, but a franchise is a Burger King or a Subway. It’s not a movie. It’s really scary ’cause you get trapped and you get scared of changing, which is the worst thing that can happen, if you want to be any kind of artist.

When you think of forever, what things come to mind for you?

Death (laughs). What is forever? God, I don’t know. Hope, I guess. That’s a difficult question.

Q&A: Kristen Stewart

On becoming unchained and whether movie momdom gave her baby fever

For four movies, Bella is contained. But now she’s a tiger let out of the cage.

I think it’s why [the movie] touches so many people. It really does represent that stage of life where you are full and pumping, bubbling over with something . . . Bella’s always losing it, she’s making very odd decisions, and they’re fully informed by feeling, and I think that now it all makes sense and she can kind of stand up and go, ‘Whew, I told you, it was worth it.’ And it’s also like breaking in a car, as well. It’s like, how fast does it go?

You and Rob and Taylor have been at the center of not just the “Twilight” story, but the “Twilight” phenomenon. Can you talk about the bonds that the three of you formed?

Yeah, it’s nice not to be alone in that, I guess. Another . . . question is, how is it going to be to walk away from this? You hold these things. I wouldn’t have done it in the first place if it wasn’t something I was always going to carry, and I think they feel the same way, they tell me they do.

What advice would you give to young actors starting a major movie franchise?

You better love it or don’t do it. At this point, I don’t have to worry about Bella anymore. It’s so weird! Where is [that pressure] I felt in the beginning? It’s not tapping me on the shoulder anymore.

Are you keeping parts of your wardrobe as mementos?

I kept the rings. The rings are really important to me.

You play a mom in this movie. Did it make you want to have a baby of your own?

Dude. I can’t wait to be a mom, but like, I can wait.

sstewart@nypost.com