The Real People Who Inspired These Harry Potter Characters

J.K. Rowling's world of witchcraft and wizardry isn't without its real-life influences. Although the characters in her Harry Potter series are all fictional — with the exception of a few errant folks like Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald's Nicolas Flamel, of course — the author did draw upon a few key traits from some real-world personas to create some of those fan favorites.

We're not just talking about all of those fancy references to famous historical figures and the little linguistic tricks contained in her names and places, either. In some cases, there are or were actual modern-day Muggles who made enough of an impression on Rowling's life to inspire her to scrawl them onto the pages of her epic fantasy series. You might be surprised at just how many of your favorite magical figures have a real-life counterpart walking around with some major bragging rights (or, in a few cases, shame) about lending their traits to some of the most popular Harry Potter characters on the page and screen.

No, there wasn't some kid with a lightning bolt on his forehead living beneath the stairs, but there were a couple of pint-sized Potters Rowling knew who played a part in developing some of Harry's attributes. Rowling remembered playing dress-up as witches and wizards with some neighborhood kids when she was growing up in Yate. She told The Guardian, "A gang of children, including myself and my sister, used to play together up and down our street. Two of the gang members were a brother and sister whose surname was Potter. I always liked that name."

It was about more than just a name, though. According to The Telegraph, Ian Potter in particular was something of a prankster and had an obsession with slugs, which might ring familiar to fans of Fred and George Weasley, or anyone who remembers when Ron's slug-slinging spell backfired. "Ian was the perfect inspiration for a wizard. He was a nightmare, forever playing tricks," his sister Vikki told The Guardian. "He used to do things like booby-trapping the stabilizers on my bike, and collecting tadpoles in jars and then plastering the green slime everywhere." 

Harry might not have been into gross trickery like Fred and George were, but he sure wasn't afraid to get himself into some sticky situations either. This Ian Potter sounds like the perfect recruit for Gryffindor — his brashness might've subconsciously inspired the whole house for all we know.

Early on in the series, the news that potions professor Severus Snape was inspired by a real-life person might sound like an insult to said individual, but once the tough-talking teacher turned out to be one of the good guys, that all changed. John Nettleship is the science teacher whose visage was borrowed for the development of Snape, and he said he's proud to have inspired the author. He told Wales Online, "I guess I was rather like the Professor Snape character in the books — demanding, wouldn't suffer fools gladly, exacting. I don't know if she was actually scared of me. She was a somewhat timorous child, but what she especially detested was chemistry. I don't know how much of it was the subject or the teacher." 

Nettleship didn't realize that he was the source of inspiration for the character, though, until his own wife told him as much. "I asked my wife, Shirley, if she thought I was Professor Snape and she said, 'Of course you are. But I didn't like to tell you because I knew you wouldn't like it,'" he recalled. "She'd been laughing that this crotchety old bugger in these books was the man she was married to." Nettleship passed in 2013, but hopefully he got to at least read the final installment to see how his literary doppelganger redeemed himself in the end.

The boastful and phony Professor Gilderoy Lockhart couldn't actually fight his way out of a paper bag, but to hear him tell tale, he was the greatest and most accomplished wizard that ever lived. While J.K. Rowling hasn't named any names, she has admitted that there was someone she once knew who embodied that same kind of resplendent fakery.

In a 2004 chat at the Edinburgh Book Festival, she explained, "I have to say that the living model was worse. He was a shocker! The lies that he told about adventures that he'd had, things he'd done and impressive acts that he had committed... He was a shocking man. I can say this quite freely because he will never in a million years dream that he is Gilderoy Lockhart." Rowling added that she was afraid whoever it was might eventually figure it out and confront her, but she's still willing to admit the representation was deliberate, saying, "the only character who I sat down and thought that I would base on someone is Gilderoy Lockhart. It made up for having to endure him for two solid years." Forget finally identifying "Becky with the Good Hair," we want to know who this mystery person is.

Before she became the author of an international phenomenon, J.K. Rowling had more than her share of struggles. As she has recalled many times, including in her address to Harvard University graduates in 2008, she wrote the series from what she described to be "rock bottom," a point in her life when she was a poor single mother with few prospects for success. Writing about the Boy Wizard's travails was her avenue of release.

She suffered through a deep depression during those times, and that experience with facing her own demons would later manifest in the dementors which were used to imprison exiles in the Harry Potter series. In a 2000 interview with The Times UK, she admitted, "It was entirely conscious. And entirely from my own experience. Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It's a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different." Similarly, the dementors simply suck all hope out of their subjects and create an eternal trap from which there is no escape.

Last but certainly not least, little Natalie McDonald deserves a mention here, too. In the text of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, there's a throwaway line about how Nearly Headless Nick was delighted to hear that House Gryffindor's newest recruit was one "McDonald, Natalie," and while that might not seem significant on its own, the backstory of this namedrop is very meaningful.

At the time of the writing, Rowling's literary reps were approached by the family of a nine-year-old girl battling leukemia who was obsessed with the Harry Potter series, and Rowling responded to the girl with a very personal note. "Jo's email was beautiful," the girl's family friend would later remember. "She didn't patronize Natalie, or tell her everything was okay; she addressed her as a human being who was going through a hard time. She talked about her books and her characters and which ones she liked best." Sadly, little Natalie didn't live long enough to read it herself, and Rowling would later include McDonald's name in her book as a bit of honor to the late little girl who loved her stories so well.