Rising to fame at just age 12 and charming us on-screen ever since, Daniel Radcliffe is one of the UK’s most-loved actors and with good reason. Of course, his career kicked off with Harry Potter but since then, he has starred in a wide range of roles and nailed them all.
Just to add to the aforementioned charm, Daniel credits none other than his parents for his success. Back in 2015, when the actor was being awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he said about his parents: “I have to thank them because you are the best parents. It was a crazy thing that we embarked on as a family 16 years ago but we made it and I made it thanks to you.”
But, who are his parents and how did they support his career?
Daniel’s parents are Alan Radcliffe and Marcia Gresham. Though they now tend to lay low, they were actually also child actors! Speaking on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2013, Daniel confessed: “Both of my parents have been actors, there were a lot of show tunes on in the car all the time. I grew up with that.”
However, he also revealed that due to having poor experiences within showbiz, the two didn’t encourage him to follow their footsteps. His mum went on to work as a casting director and his dad, a literary agency.
That didn’t stop Daniel from getting the acting bug, though. “I was five. I turned to my mum and said, ‘Mum, I want to be an actor’,” he told Parade in 2012.
However, it wasn’t until five years later when the actor was 10 that he had his first role; starring in the BBC’s two-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘David Copperfield’.
As for his role in Harry Potter? Well, his parents, instead of seeing it as a paycheque for the family, actually weren’t sure if the actor should take the role.
During HBO’s Harry Potter reunion special, director Chris Columbus said that the parents weren’t convinced that Daniel should have joined the cast as it would be a “huge disruption to his life.”
In fact, they actually turned down the opportunity for him to even audition until producer David Heyman convinced them.
According to an interview Radcliffe did with Entertainment Tonight, his parents have never wavered in support of him. He said: “My parents were incredible. They were really supportive.”
He added that he counts himself lucky as he had such a great upbringing as a child actor saying: “They walked the balance of not being pushy but always supportive. In a way that’s not often credited to the parents of child actors.”
Daniel became a father last April and had previously said his parents set the bar high for parenthood saying: “I just look back and go, ‘Man, they really made things easy for me and comprehensible and not scary.’ I don’t think they were ever thinking, ‘We have to do this.’ I think my mum and dad were just parenting very instinctively.”
What a wholesome little family they are.