It’s hard to know whether J.K. Rowling’s real-life story or Harry Potter’s fictional story is the more magical one.
You can ponder this yourself tonight when Lifetime airs “Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story” — a biopic of the life and hard times of Rowling, whose “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” opened to record-breaking blockbuster success this past weekend.
The story begins with Rowling (Poppy Montgomery) arriving to mad crowds at the premiere of the first Harry Potter movie. Overwhelmed and still somewhat in a state of shock at her meteoric rise to fame, Rowling supposedly stayed longer than she should have in the limo.
Cut to 8-year-old Joanne Rowling (Aislyn Watson) playing witch with her sisters in the woods near her home in England. When a bigger, rougher boy comes along and starts to menace them, little Joanne scares the bejesus of out him by telling him of the evil witches in the woods.
We follow Rowling into high school (then played by Madison Desjarlais), where “a weaslely boy” with red hair becomes her best (and almost only) friend. Shaken to the core by her mother’s sudden onset of multiple sclerosis, Rowling, somewhat rebellious, doesn’t get into Oxford to study writing but goes elsewhere and studies languages.
But all she wants to do is write and, after college, she loses one job after another. On a train ride after an unsuccessful job interview, the Harry saga falls out of her head — and she begins writing it.
After the devastating death of her mom (Janet Kidder), Rowling moves to Portugal to teach English and meets Jorge Arantes (Antonio Cupo), a playboy journalist. He cheats on her, he breaks her heart, she marries him anyway and continues to escape into her magical Harry Potter land, trying slowly to construct the novel.
After baby Jessica is born, Jorge begins to abuse Rowling physically.
She manages to leave him and moves to Edinburgh with her infant. No work, no prospects and nothing to do but go on welfare.
With no options, she keeps on the dole and attempts to write each day. She finally gets an agent, followed by a dozen flat-out rejections from publishers. But all she needs is one publisher to believe in her — which finally happens.
In three years, Rowling went from welfare mother to one of the richest women in Great Britain, with 400 million books in print. If you’ve ever been a single mom and couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, this is the perfect movie for you.