A FEELGOOD film charting the unlikely alliance between an American widow and an unkempt man living in a tumbledown shack hidden away on Hampstead Heath has already being billed as the next Notting Hill.

But the apparent real-life inspiration for Hampstead – a new movie starring Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton and Emmy-winner Brendan Gleeson – was less than impressed when the New Journal dropped by his tent to ask him what he thought of his story being told on a cinema screen.

Harry Hallowes, 79, who was nicknamed “Harry the Hermit” by tabloids after spending years roughing it on the Heath, had a blunt response, telling the New Journal: “It’s stupid.”

Shouting from inside the tent through torrential rain, he could be heard beyond the fence that stretches around his half acre of land. He said: “I don’t want anything to do with it. I never wanted anything to do with it.”

The casting for the film was announced in the United States on Tuesday. Its promoters say it is “inspired by a true story”, telling how unkempt Donald “has lived quietly and harmoniously on the edge of the Heath for 17 years”.

The marketing material does not mention Mr Hallowes by name, but there is nobody else living permanently on the famous open space.

Harry Hallowes' tent

Mr Gleeson will play Donald when the cameras arrive in Hampstead early next year, while Ms Keaton will be seen as an American widow who becomes fascinated with the man on the Heath despite their chalk-and-cheese lifestyles. An “unlikely alliance” develops, the movie’s writers promise.

The plot has it that Donald’s life on the Heath is put under threat by developers, but in real life Mr Hallowes is safeguarded by squatters’ rights, having been awarded his plot of land by law.

As the rain poured down yesterday (Wednesday), he refused to come out of his tent, insisting that the film would be “rubbish”.

Mr Hallowes has lived in  remote and secluded woodland, in the lesser-trodden north-east of Hampstead Heath, just below Athlone House, for more than 25 years. He successfully claimed the land under squatters’ rights in 2007, leading to him being billed, unkindly, by the Daily Mail as “Britain’s richest tramp”.

His dark green tent, garden chairs, gas cylinders and water bottles are not visible from the main paths of the Heath and only the most intrepid walkers would stumble across his camp. Under a restricted covenant agreed in 1923 between the 6th Earl of Mansfield, whose family built Kenwood House, and Sir Robert Waley Cohen, who owned Athlone House, no building of any kind – temporary or permanent – can be placed on the land. However, in the movie Hampstead, his “ramshackle hut… is the target of property developers” using “heavy-handed tactics to remove him”.

Diane Keaton and Brendan Gleeson are coming to film in Hampstead

Harry’s entitlement to his plot of land emerged after the owners of Athlone House tried to evict him but were thwarted by the fact that he had occupied it for more than 12 years and therefore had squatter’s rights. 

Film buffs are already speculating that the film Hampstead might do what “Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts did for Notting Hill” 16 years ago. Filming will be “on location”, although fans of Notting Hill will remember how one of its key scenes was shot just a short walk from Mr Hallowes’ home, on the grassy banks in front of Kenwood House.

Film company Ecosse will produce Hampstead, having been behind big-money cinema releases Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights and Diana.

It is unclear whether the movie company has approached Mr Hallowes to film on his land but he did say he “never wanted anything to do with it”, before reminding the New Journal it was not worth getting out of bed to talk about and insisting he must be “left in peace”.