Harry Potter star '˜poured water' over man at Waverley Station

HARRY Potter actress Miriam Margolyes has told how she poured water over a young man at Waverley station after he refused to give up his seat for her.

Margolyes, 74, who played Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter movies, said: “I was waiting for a train at Waverley station in Edinburgh. My knee was hurting so I asked a young man for his seat. He replied: ‘There’s one over there’. I said: ‘Please’ and when he refused I poured my water over him.

“He swore and another lady said: ‘You assaulted him. I’m reporting you to the police’. She did. Nothing happened.”

The actress also told how she was “terribly upset” not to be cast as Sairey Gamp in BBC series Dickensian because she felt she had been born for the part.

She had her eye on the part of Ms Gamp – a dissolute, drunken nurse from the Charles Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit.

She said: “I was terribly upset not to be in Dickensian, so I pretend to look down on it. The part I should have played, Mrs Gamp, is done brilliantly by Pauline Collins, but I entered this world for no other reason than to play that part.

“Maybe it’s for the best, though. As Wilde says: ‘When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers’.”

She can instead be seen in The Real Marigold Hotel, a travel series inspired by the Bafta-nominated film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.