Star Wars, Harry Potter actor faces jail for exposing himself to teen girl on train

London: A dwarf who played Ewok in ‘Star Wars’ and as a goblin in ‘Harry Potter’ is facing jail after he indecently exposed himself to a schoolgirl on a train.

Nicholas Read, 40, who stands 4ft 5in, had drunk half a bottle of gin and was feeling “merry” when he sat next to the 17-year-old girl on the train from London, and performed the indecent act. Read covered his lap with a bowler hat that he had been wearing and fondled himself, and the teenager told court she had been too scared to say anything and feared he could assault her. The actor denied the claims and said that the hat was not on the overhead racks because he couldn’t reach them. “He placed his hat on his crotch. I saw a movement and I didn’t know whether to believe it,” the Daily Mail quoted the girl as saying in court from behind a screen. “I looked in the reflection of the window and saw his hand moving under the hat. He tried to catch my attention, tilting his hat up, looking at his crotch area and then looking at me a few times,” she said. The behaviour continued for between 30 and 40 minutes of the 55-minute journey. “She tried to move away but she was against the window, pressed against the glass,” Victoria Rose, prosecuting, said. The girl said that when she got off the train at Leicester, “he put his legs on to the seat, leaving his hat on his crotch and I had to squeeze past him”. She was met by her boyfriend and they reported the incident to a British Transport police officer, who arranged for Read to be arrested at his destination in Sheffield. Read, of Cheadle, near Stoke-on-Trent, claimed nothing untoward had taken place, but he was convicted of indecent exposure for the train incident, which took place last October, and will be sentenced next month. ANI