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TV war role for Potter star
By This is London Last updated at 09:16am on 29.08.06
Daniel Radcliffe will play Rudyard Kipling's son
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Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has signed up to play Rudyard Kipling's son, who was sent to the First World War trenches by his father, in a new ITV drama about The Jungle Book author.
My Boy Jack will be 17-year-old Radcliffe's first TV drama since shooting to worldwide fame in the blockbuster Harry Potter movies.
The two-hour film, announced at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, is the true story of how the Indian-born British novelist, short story writer and poet, used his influence to get his 17-year-old son a commission with the Irish Guards, despite his terrible eyesight.
Kipling's son John, who was known as Jack, never returned from the trenches, and his parents spent years searching for his body.
One of the great "drum-beaters" recruiting men to fight in the war, Kipling's reputation suffered following the conflict when he was branded a jingoistic imperialist.
The author is being played by the film's writer David Haig, who was also cast as Kipling in the stage play version of the show at London's Hampstead Theatre.
The drama, which ITV's controller of drama Nick Elliott said would have connotations for fathers grieving for their sons in the Iraq war, will begin filming next year in Sussex, where the Kipling family lived.
Radcliffe, who is also set to bare all in a West End play with a stage debut in Peter Shaffer's Equus - a drama about a stable boy's erotic fixation with horses, said he wanted to honour the memory of those who died in the First World War.
The actor said: "For many people my age, the First World War is just a topic in a history book. But I've always been fascinated by the subject and think it's as relevant today as it ever was, with young men still sacrificing their lives in the name of war.
"I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like in the trenches, living amongst the stench of death and knowing that any moment may be your last.
"But I think it's important we try to imagine the horrors these young men experienced and to never forget them. I am extremely proud to be part of the production of My Boy Jack and only hope I can do justice to the memory of the men who fought and those who died," said Radcliffe.
Kipling, author of the poem If, was Britain's first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907) and the youngest winner of the prize. He wrote his most famous work, The Jungle Book (1894).
After his son died at the Battle of Loos in 1915, he wrote in his Epitaphs of War: "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied".
He joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group now responsible for the graves and memorials of 1.7 million Commonwealth men and women who died in the two World Wars.
His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war graves. He also wrote a history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment.
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