A girl who grew up in an alternate universe— featuring in Potter franchise from age 9 to 21 – this luminous beauty has become an international star.
Hollywood diva and fashionista, she makes the cut for top-earning, sexiest, and most popular celebrities in leading magazines including Forbes and Empire.
Using her Hollywood fame, this UN Goodwill Ambassador brought attention to gender issues.
Childhood
Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson was born on April 15, 1990 in Paris to English parents. Her parents separated when she was five.
Watson moved back to England to live with her mother in Oxfordshire while spending weekends at her father’s house in London.
She attended the Dragon School in Oxford and was a straight A student. She wanted to become an actress and trained up to five hours a day at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts. She graduated from Brown University with an AB in English Literature in 2014.
Career
During a nationwide casting search, nine-year-old Watson was picked out of her school to audition for the role of Hermione Granger in the screen adaptation of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. On her ninth callback, Watson lands the role.
Watson, 11, made her debut with ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ in 2001. The movie turned out to be an enormous success and grossed more than $974 million worldwide.
For the next decade Watson stayed busy filming the Potter series. In 2002 she reprised the role of Hermione for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in 2004 for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and continued to star in the eight-part series through the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, in 2011.
Watson’s first non-Potter role was the 2007 BBC film Ballet Shoes which garnered decent reviews.
In 2008, Watson lent her voice in the animated film ‘The Tale of Despereaux’.
She has taken on starring roles in ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ (2012) and ‘The Bling Ring’ (2013), made a brief appearance as an “exaggerated” Emma Watson in ‘This Is the End’ (2014), and portrayed the title character’s adopted daughter in ‘Noah’.
Other projects
She served on a jury to select the 2004 teen-aged film-makers’ First Light Film Awards.Â
In September 2009 Watson announced that she was working with People Tree, a fashion label that promotes fair trade. She catapulted into the world of high fashion and modeling when she was chosen as the face of Burberry’s Autumn/Winter 2009 collection, and again for the 2010 Spring/Summer collection.
Watson has promoted education for girls, visiting Bangladesh and Zambia to do so.  In 2014, she was appointed as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She helped launch the UN Women campaign HeForShe. The Ms Foundation for Women named Watson its Feminist Celebrity of 2014.
Personal Life
Watson is a cat lover and has two cats named Bubbles and Domino.
She enjoys playing field hockey, netball and tennis (for school and local teams), skiing, painting, cooking, singing, and dancing (has twice competed with her school in Rock Challenge 2006 and 2007).