That kind of ability to get your own way is often ascribed to psychopaths, but in her work Potter makes us wonder if the same idea really applies to borderline patients.
"I think it's a just criticism of the modern Beatrix Potters is that they lack the sardonic humor that makes Beatrix Potter so much fun for kids and grown-ups," Mr. Bidwell said.
But it is just a hint, and Ms. Bonham Carter's hearty performance makes Mrs. Potter almost lovable.
This time Ms. Rowling offers her clearest proof yet of what should have been wonderfully obvious: what makes the Potter books so popular is the radically simple fact that they're so good.
Although they may have been intended as celebratory tributes to the originals, these new editions shun the very thing that made Beatrix Potter so famous in the first place: the delicate, intricate illustrations that have delighted readers for years.
Frank Capra, who had once used a banker as a hero (in his 1932 "American Madness," loosely based on the Bank of America's A. P. Giannini), made Mr. Potter, the miserly businessman played by Lionel Barrymore, the ultimate villain of his postwar "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946).
One of the things that has made the Potter books so appealing to children and many adults is Ms. Rowling's magpie ability to take archetypes and plot points from myriad sources -- myths, fairy tales, children's classics and movies -- and alchemize them into something new.
Mr. Voulkos began as a potter making functional ceramics but later created hulking sculptures out of clay.
Also slipped in are slender notes toward an autobiography; about his early days as a potter, making X in Wales, then Y in Sheffield, before finding success and its trappings: studio assistants, installations and exhibitions in London and New York, commissions for wealthy collectors.
The first thing to do when making a harry potter wand is to get a stick, either straight from a tree or one that's fallen off a tree.
The snappiest part of the exhibition is the display of 20th-century contributions made by potters involved with the Japan Folk Art, or Mingei, Movement.
