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Is Harry’s doom ahead in ‘Hallows’?

Could she? Would she?

Millions of Harry Potter fans are holding their collective breath, waiting to find out if J.K. Rowling will do away with one of the most beloved characters in children’s literature.

They won’t know until the final book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” is published July 21, but anything is possible.

Daniel Radcliffe, who has played Harry Potter in the movies since he was 10 years old, thinks he’s doomed.

But Radcliffe, like most connected with the latest movie, is quick to say he has no inside knowledge.

“Occasionally, I get asked by people on the street, ‘Do you know what will happen in the seventh book?’ And they get really annoyed when I tell them I don’t. So lately I’ve started saying. ‘I really can’t tell you anything.’ ”

Rowling isn’t naming names, but she has said at least two characters will bite the dust.

This week she hinted at Harry’s possible demise: “I think that Harry’s story comes to quite a clear end, sadly,” she said.

The book’s most explosive secret: who survives the final confrontation between Harry and archnemesis Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry’s parents.

According to the prophecy revealed in the fifth book, “The Order of the Phoenix,” “either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.”

David Yates, director of the film version of “Phoenix,” now in theaters, has a hunch Harry might be martyred, but he laughs when he’s told Radcliffe would prefer it that way.

“Daniel just wants a really good death scene, as an actor,” Yates says.

But the director is eager to see if their guesses prove right.

“I am like everybody else,” says Yates. “I wonder if she’s going to kill Harry off. That’s my pet theory. I think she might.”

Academics who have studied Potter have a different take.

“My sense is that Rowling is going to come up with a very creative way whereby the prophecy will be fulfilled in a way that none of us understood,” says James Krasner, a Potter fan who teaches Victorian literature at New Hampshire University in Durham.

He thinks Voldemort will die and that, in the end, “Harry will be bloodied but unbowed. We’re only going to be satisfied if, ultimately, he’s rewarded.”

Krasner says Harry won’t die because Rowling won’t “undercut” the British Private Boy School genre in which she writes. “Having Harry die would be a miserable plotting failure.”

In the battle of good vs. evil, Rowling is on the side of good, says Philip Nel, who teaches a course on Rowling’s literary influences at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “I don’t think she’s ruthless enough to kill off the hero,” he says.

Says Radcliffe: “The thing is, J.K. Rowling has the most brilliant mind for storytelling. I imagine she’ll surprise us in a way that no one has even thought of.”