24-05-2025
Bestselling Chocolat author JOANNE HARRIS on the disgusting quip Harvey Weinstein made to her at the Oscars
Sometime in 2000, the French actress Juliette Binoche travelled to Barnsley, West Yorkshire. She was there to meet Joanne Harris – then a schoolteacher who published novels on the side. The film rights to her third book, Chocolat, had been sold to Hollywood and Binoche had signed on to play the heroine, Vianne. She asked Harris if she could visit her, to chat about the part.
'Juliette came to stay in our two-bedroom semi in Barnsley,' recalls Harris. 'We didn't have a spare bedroom, so she slept in our kid's bed, tucked up with a toy dinosaur.'
Today, Chocolat – a sensuous tale of a woman causing mayhem by opening a chocolaterie selling such delights as 'nipples of Venus' in a sleepy French town – has sold some 35 million copies worldwide. That makes Harris one of the authors to have joined the elite 'millionaire's club' – writers who have sold more than one million copies of at least one of their novels in the UK (others include JK Rowling, Julia Donaldson, Helen Fielding and Kate Mosse).
This week, Harris publishes Chocolat's prequel, Vianne, which is why we are meeting at her home. I imagine the 60-year-old in a Mayfair penthouse. Instead, she and her husband Kevin, whom she met at Barnsley sixth-form college aged 16 and who now works as her business manager, live in a gorgeous but ramshackle five-bedroom Victorian house outside Huddersfield. It's 18 miles from where she was born, packed with quirky objects and backs on to five acres of woodland, where Harris writes in a converted shed.
'My mother thinks it's dreadful – she says it's old and messy,' laughs Harris. 'But I see no reason to leave Yorkshire. My family and friends are nearby, and staying here has kept me grounded.
'We have a little flat in London, which is very useful as I go up and down a lot. Apart from that I don't really have any indulgences. I don't splash out on fast cars and diamonds.'
The daughter of an English father and French mother – both teachers, who raised her bilingual – Harris was born above her paternal grandparents' corner shop in Barnsley. 'They spoke no French and my grandparents in France spoke no English, so it made me an outsider wherever I went.'
She longed to write, but her mother was horrified. 'She showed me all these books by 19th-century French authors who died penniless and said: 'This is not a proper job.''
So, after studying modern and medieval languages at Cambridge, Harris became a trainee accountant, but within a year she failed her exams and was sacked. After that, she worked as a French teacher at an all-boys' private school.
Between teaching and raising her son Fred – now 30 and working as a lighting technician in London – she wrote constantly. Her first book, The Evil Seed, was published in 1992. 'It was a literary vampire novel, read by about 20 people. I was paid about £2,000 for it.' Her second novel, Sleep, Pale Sister, similarly sank without trace. Undeterred, she began drafting a third, set in France, full of lavish descriptions of elaborate meals.
She sent it to a bigwig New York agent for feedback. 'He said, 'Who the hell wants to read about some French village nobody's heard of? Why are there so many old people and no young people having sex on a bearskin rug? And what's with all the food?''
Many authors would have been crushed. Not Harris. 'Most things I do are motivated by the desire to annoy people, so I wrote exactly the book that agent told me not to write.' In four months, she'd completed Chocolat. Initially, the agent was vindicated: no publisher wanted it. Harris went on holiday to Ireland. Only when she checked in on her mother did she learn her British agent was urgently trying to reach her from the international Frankfurt Book Fair. 'I called her, she said: 'Everyone is talking about Chocolat.' First the Italians bought it, then everyone followed.' Within a week, the book was sold to 23 countries and film rights sold for £5,000 (after its cinematic release Harris received a further £100,000 in royalties).
'None of the deals were big bucks but together were enough for me to take some time off teaching.' She asked for a year's sabbatical, only for the book to become a word-of-mouth bestseller.
'I kept seeing people reading it on the tube; I thought, 'This is crazy!'' After the film's release and Oscar nomination, sales topped one million. 'I realised I wasn't going back to teaching. When I told the school, they said, 'We all knew that. We've given your job to someone else.''
Newfound fame was often overwhelming. 'I passed out at two premieres and the Baftas. One minute I'd be fine and the next… my word! I thought something was wrong with me but now I think it was just stress; after a year it stopped.'
At the Oscars, wearing a borrowed red Amanda Wakeley dress, she was seated beside Sigourney Weaver and behind Clint Eastwood. Despite the glamour, Harris was bored. 'It was like a very long school speech day at Madame Tussaud's, with diamonds.' She encountered Johnny Depp, a star of Chocolat who hadn't been on the film set when she'd visited. 'People kept asking for my thoughts on him, but as I'd never met him I said, 'He's not my type.' Then I met him on the red carpet. He said, 'Apparently I'm not your type.' But he was laughing.'
Harris was surprised at how nervous Depp was. 'I used to think I was the most awkward person in the room until I met him. We bonded over that. I don't think he enjoyed being a sex symbol. From his work, and from what he said to me that brief time we met, I got the feeling he was on a mission to be somebody other than who he was.'
(Depp has since been mired in controversy due to his high-profile court battle with ex-wife Amber Heard. On this, Harris says: 'I don't know what happened, it sounds traumatic for everyone.')
At a Bafta party she encountered Chocolat's producer, Harvey Weinstein, now serving a 16-year prison sentence for rape. 'He said, 'I'm Harvey Weinstein, when I come into a room, authors s**t their pants.' I said, 'In that case, Harvey, you'll get my dry-cleaning bill.' He laughed and moved on. I got the feeling he liked it when people stood up to him.'
After the menopause and surviving breast cancer in 2020, Harris says little intimidates her. Yet she avoids controversy, declining to discuss her announcement, two years ago on Twitter, that her son, Fred, is transgender, merely saying, 'Somebody had tried to out [Fred] on Twitter and was trying to blackmail me.' (She also won't be drawn on her spell as chair of the Society of Authors, when she became embroiled in a Twitter spat with JK Rowling, who had complained that Harris had never communicated with her about the death and rape threats she'd received from transgender activists.)
After selling 30-plus million copies of a single novel, many authors might have put their feet up. But in the 26 years since Chocolat came out, Harris has published 29 more books, from fantasies to thrillers. There have also been three well-received sequels to Chocolat. Now there's Vianne, which gives insights into her witch-like heroine's youth.
'I thought it'd be fun to go back and see Vianne when she couldn't cook and had never really tasted chocolate. Many people assume she is me, but I rarely invite people to dinner and if I do the food's a bit experimental as I rarely stick to a recipe. Vianne also has an itch to keep moving. I like to stay in my shed in Yorkshire and write.'
