Former child star tells youngsters - don't do it

Adrian Hall has one piece advice for any youngster seeking a career in acting - don't. Be a vet or an accountant instead, he says.

He was just eight when he starred alongside Dick Van Dyke as his son, Jeremy, in the hugely successful film of Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

For a while, he found himself in a Hollywood world, a whirl of press interviews and camera flash bulbs. He met the Queen at the premiere, and was showered with toys.

But it all fizzled out soon enough. Today, aged 45, he lives in West Sussex, UK. His job? To teach budding stage managers.

Each year, he tours the country lecturing to aspiring actors: "I spend the entire two hours telling them not to do this. If 99 per cent of the audience listen, I believe I have been successful. And the one per cent who don't listen are probably the right people to do it, because of their determination.

"The profession is like betting on a three-legged horse. Who would take those odds? It is ridiculous, crazy."

His co-star, Heather Ripley, who at the age of eight played his twin sister Jemima in the 1968 film, paid a high price as a result of her brush with stardom.

She returned home to Scotland, her natural accent erased by elocution lessons, to teasing from schoolmates. For many years, she blamed the film for the collapse of her parents' marriage.

It was, she says, "the worst thing that ever happened to me". In later years, she ended up living the life of an eco-warrior, a single mother trying to make ends meet.

Yesterday she said that stardom was a "terrible thing to inflict on a child."

She added: "It created an almost permanent sense of complete isolation, I was separated from all my friends and family at an age when I think they are more important to you than anything in the world.

To this day, I still have a feeling of separateness hard to describe. I have huge difficulties in close relationships because of that.

"Mr Hall credits his easy transition back into normal life to the grounded world in which he grew up. The son of an engineer and a nurse, he had initially been sent to stage school as a cure for his shyness. His family lived close to Pinewood during the filming.

"It was easy for me. I was not away from my friends or my family. Every evening I would go home and go out on my bike.

"Heather had problems because she was away from home for 14 months. I was her only friend. You can't do that to a child.

They start to believe that that is the real world, and it is not.

"Thanks to "outstanding" tutors at Pinewood, the young Mr Hall returned to school a year ahead.

While he endured some of the teasing which distressed Ms Ripley, he was secure enough to cope with it.

In the ensuing years, he enjoyed a moderately successful West End career and married Barbara Ward, an actress. But their jobs never brought enough success or stability, particularly when they had their two sons, Daniel, now 26, and Nicholas, 23.

Mr Hall says: "When one of us wasn't working the other one was. But one year both of us didn't work and I decided it was time to take an ordinary job.

"Fifteen years ago he took a job teaching drama. Today, he is head of the production school of the GSA Conservatoire in Guildford in the more "grounded" profession he said of stage management and technicians.

Mr Hall says: "The job I am doing is the best job in the world. I would not be doing this job if it wasn't for the film. It all dominoed from there."

But Ms Ripley is keen to go back. Now happily living in Scotland with two grown up kids, she is about to start rehearsals for a new film in Dundee, hoping to re-emerge from obscurity after three decades.

When the West End stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opened recently, the former child stars were given a taste of what life might have been like.

Mr Hall explains: "We drew up outside the London Palladium and the road was packed so we got out of the car. Instantly, 30 or 40 people from the press started shouting "Adrian, Heather".

I had a great time that night but I was back at work the next day - back in my office where people just think of me as the boss and there are no press trying to take my picture.

You have got to accept that it is not real life."

He continues: "If I had become some major star, I am sure I would have got into drink, drugs and sexual abuse. I would have been the worst kind of Hollywood star."

He worries about how the young Harry Potter actors cope with the intense adulation now being showered on them.

While Mr Hall and Ms Ripley were paid just a couple of thousand pounds from the film, Daniel Radcliffe is said to earn a seven-figure sum.

Ms Ripley says: "My advice to the Harry Potter stars would be make sure you have the best possible lawyer and financial advisor you can find that you are sure you can trust. Expect to be exploited, and make sure you get decent qualifications at school."

Mr Hall says: "I hope they have people looking after them that are equipped to do this. As the old Hollywood saying goes, people start to believe their own publicity.

"My advice would be take three months off every year and go and do something real, do something so you understand what it is to have to work, to have to find money and to have to deal with people who are not all telling you that you how wonderful you are.

"When everyone is telling them they are something special, I hope someone reinforces the message they are the same as everybody else."

- INDEPENDENT