It runs in the family…..

“There is nothing new about celebrity casting,” wrote the Telegraph’s Charles Spencer in a review yesterday, “but attempting to sell a show by casting the offspring of the famous appears to be the latest trick in an age unhealthily obsessed with all things ‘sleb’.”

There’s another manifestation of this next week, of course, when Chicago sees the London stage debut of Kelly Osbourne as Mama Morton – as I recently wrote in the Sunday Express, it is “a living embodiment of the show’s astringent critique of phoney celebrity. Who next - Paris Hilton?”

But Charlie’s review, of course, was of the double bill of American plays, Lone Star and Pvt Wars, that opened at the King’s Head last Thursday, of which he wrote that the unique selling point was that it marks the professional stage debut of James Jagger, son of Sir Mick and Jerry Hall.

But he was as surprised as I was that the casting of young James wasn’t actually taking the mick, so to speak. In fact, I spoke to one of the show’s two young co-producers, Sally Humphreys, in the interval, and she assured me that he arrived in the play by a conventional casting call – his agents at ICM responded to an ad in PCR and put him up for it. And he had to audition twice before he won the role. While all the attendant publicity is a fringe dream, he had to actually prove he could do it. And though his previous stage experience, as Charles Spencer’s review pointed out, “has been limited to an amateur theatre society in Barnes”, he made a seriously accomplished and witty stage debut. As Charlie concluded, “I have a hunch that, in a few years’ time, Jagger will be known as a gifted actor in his own right.”

And that, ultimately, is what everyone has to do – a famous parent may get you started, but you have to prove yourself. Peter Hall cast his daughter, Rebecca, in a West End production of Mrs Warren’s Profession when she was fresh out of dropping out of Cambridge University after her second year there, and was hugely vindicated. But, as Sir Peter admitted to me when he cast her again as Rosalind in his production of As You Like It a couple of years later, it had been a “terrible risk, but the honest truth is that I was so confident about her abilities that I really didn’t think about them, which was mainly to her, let’s face it. I didn’t realise that until after the first night. If she had failed, or been not just good, but very, very, very good, she would never have worked again. The profession is not forgiving. So if it had gone wrong, it would have been dreadful.”

In fact Sir Peter had already used Rebecca’s acting services many years before that – when she was not quite nine years old, she had appeared in his TV adaptation of The Camomile Lawn. Rebecca’s half-brother Edward followed even more closely in his father’s footsteps, to become an accomplished director in his own right – as Sir Peter also told me, “I’m as proud as hell of Edward, who I think is one of the best directors in the country now”. And yet another of Hall’s progeny, his daughter Lucy, has designed his productions of Happy Days and Whose Life is it Anyway? Each is carving out their own niche in the business.

But for every Hall or Redgrave – or the Strallen sisters Scarlett and Summer, whose aunt is Bonnie Langford – there’s the danger of falling far short of your parents’ accomplishments when you put yourself on the stage, as happened to Finty Williams, daughter of Judi Dench and Michael Williams, or the Olivier/Plowright daughters, Julie Kate (who acted early on but whose most recent IMDB credit has her down as Production Supervisor on a 2004 film Peace One Day) and Tamsin, who have fallen by the acting wayside. Or there’s the huge burden of Steven Ayckbourn as he makes his playwrighting debut to follows in the footsteps of his father Sir Alan, one of the most popular and prolific of all British playwrights, that he’s chronicled in an interview in the current issue of The Stage.

Then there are the children who far eclipse their parents. Kiera Knightley is now one of the biggest of all British movie stars – while dad Will is about to appear at the Bush in David Watson’s Flight Path (from September 12).