J. K. Rowling isn’t the richest woman living in the U.K. The richest woman living in the U.K. is Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, who is worth $7.3 billion. J. K. Rowling is tied for second richest woman living in the U.K. with Lily Safra (unless you separate out the woman in certain couples, as I mention in the next paragraph). Incidentally, Forbes doesn’t rank Queen Elizabeth on their list, probably because it doesn’t make much sense to distinguish what she owns herself and what the U.K. owns that she uses.
Rowling is tied with three other people for being the 48th richest person living in the U.K. There are several entries on the Forbes list of the richest people living in the U.K. that are well above Rowling which are married couples or families so that if you separated out the woman in the couple or family they would be richer than Rowling. If you want to look at the list, click on the link I give in my post. Towards the bottom of the webpage that comes up, there is a list of things to search on that includes “Residence”. Click on that. This gives a list ordered by residence of the richest people. Unfortunately, Forbes was sloppy about classifying residence, so you have to merge the list of people living in the U.K. starting on page 25 of the list and the two living in Scotland listed on page 19 of the list.
This is really typical of posts here. Instead of talking about facts, like exactly what Rowling is really worth and whether someone else is richer, people want to argue about the meaning of “fabulous,” as though it had a universally clear definition. Apparently this is because it would be too difficult for you to actually look up information that is not only available in a simple Internet search but is on a webpage that I’ve already linked to. It’s also typical that people want to talk about the meaning of “fabulous” rather than the point that I wanted to make in my post, which is jobs in entertainment don’t lead you to fabulous riches, unless you include investing in entertainment companies. My point in my post was that nearly all of the richest people in the world are people you’ve never heard of. Like everybody else, you’re being celebrity-obsessed, as if entertainment celebrities were actually important in influencing the world. The people who really control the world are people you’ve never heard of.
> It would really suck if you were J.K. Rowling then. If only your dream was to be
> among the 1063 richest people in the world. You’d have made it.
Incidentally, I should make it clear that it’s not my wildest dreams that I’m talking about. I was using “fabulously wealthy beyond your wildest dreams” in a generic sense. Being fabulously wealthy never enters in my dreams.
Perhaps you could adopt the phrase “fabulously wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of those persons that, unlike me, have wild dreams about fabulous wealth” for the sake of clarity.
Ummm…Wendall that was you. We were all talking about how much money Rowling made from books vs movies which was what the OP asked. Until you posted and went off on a tangent about how much money constitutes fabulous wealth, which nobody else had been talking about. And now you’re talking about celebrities, which again is a subject nobody else has mentioned.
Wow, there was I thinking you hijacked this thread, then whined about that exact hijack - but then you highlighted Little Nemo’s minor faux pas and BLAM! I forgot all about it.
Let’s desist with the hijack about what constitutes “fabulously wealthy,” especially since it has become acrimonious. The question on the table is the relative contribution of J.K. Rowling’s earnings from books or movies. Let’s stick to that. Those who wish to discuss what exactly “fabulously wealthy” means can open another thread in IMHO.
Writers don’t make a lot of money from selling books to films. No one, not even at the top of the food chain. There are just too many examples of wildly popular books not translating to film. I’ve never heard of a book deal that went for more than the low millions. Selling rights for the first 4 movies for £1,000,000 sounds right to me, whether that’s each or all together.
And almost all deals are for a set fee, one time payment. Rowling may be the exception, but I’ve never heard of a writer getting gross points. …
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We don’t know how much, but the Tolkien Estate did manage to get a cut of the revenue of the recent movies.
I believe she had final approval or veto power, Sunspace. I remember hearing that she intervened with the screenwriter for Order of the Phoenix tried to leave Kreacher out.
That’s not quite what the link says. His estate was $50m when he died in 1973 - so none of that would be from the movies. It says his estate got over $100m from the movies in an agreement in September.
It also says cause (of death) was “bleeding ulcer”. I know the feeling.