There is a little girl who comes from nowhere, dreams of landing the role in the film of her favourite book and it actually happens. Effortlessly, she ascends the ladder of fame and fortune. She has a fairy-dust-coated magical childhood filled with red carpets and movie stardom. There are no photos of her stumbling out of nightclubs drunk, no poisonous ex-boyfriends selling their stories; there is nothing lurid or shady or dark. She grows up. Her life changes forever. She discovers she can’t ride the bus any more but she can design her own collection of clothes, secure lucrative modelling contracts and have Capital Fun. She turns out to be beautiful, wealthy, powerful and in control. Despite her colossal fame, she remains grounded and beloved by all. She has, obviously, the perfect life. So why is Emma Watson crying into her scrambled eggs? “This book,” she says, shaking her head with disgust, “is total fiction.”

We are seated on a velvet brown banquette at a corner table in a grand hotel in New York. Breakfast sits untouched as she stares at her fact on the cover of ‘Emma Watson: the Biography’. She is dressed in a baggy jumper with her hair pulled back; her younger-looking expressive face currently registers anguish.

Previous interviews with Watson have portrayed her as a self-possessed, mature young woman who acknowledges her luck and gratitude in abundance. Perhaps, as she will later say, if I’d met her on a different morning, that side of her would have been present.…

Emma Watson, the onetime co-star of the most successful movie franchise ever, is a very grateful and a very lucky person. How do I know that? Because I sat down with the 22-year-old in a gastropub in a trendy neighborhood of North London, and in the course of an hour’s conversation she said “grateful” five times and “lucky” eight. True, of those five “grateful”s two were of the “ungrateful” form — yet these were embedded in clauses like “I felt guilty because I felt like that meant I was ungrateful. . . .” So, as you can see, Watson is a young woman who wants it put firmly on the record that she understands human lives are shaken up in the snow globe of uncertainty, and that simply because she’s ended up being covered in golden flakes, she doesn’t take it as her due, oh, no.

Pale skinned, serious of mien, with tiny little Meissen china ears furled tightly against her tiny little Meissen china head, her brown hair scraped back into a bunch, her meager form lost in a baggy white T-shirt, Watson still looks younger than she is. She’s neat-featured; all the headlines of her face — eyes, brows, cheekbones — seem as if underlined. And it’s quite possible that this rather serious emphasis, all those years ago, alerted the casting director that this 9-year-old girl should play Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies, rather than the umpteen thousand others who were gagging, swooning, dying to do so.…

NOBODY ever got through high school without being a little aimless and more than a little dramatic. Not so long ago Emma Watson discovered that for herself.

Ms. Watson was in this leafy suburb of Pittsburgh, a 30-minute drive from the glass-and-steel downtown, filming a movie that’s set at Peters Township High School. Every day she arrived at the sprawling campus, with its swim team and banners promoting reading, to experience the youthful rites that, as the Oxfordshire-bred star of the “Harry Potter” franchise from age 10 to 20, had otherwise eluded her.

“Oh my goodness, so many firsts,” she said, speaking in an excited rush during a break from filming. “I did the prom! We all get dressed up and we go in a limo, and get photographs. It’s been really fun for me to get to graduate. Eating in the school canteen; all these things that I’ve always sort of said to my American friends, ‘Oh, that looks amazing, that looks so fun, I’m jealous.’ And I get to do it for this movie.”

The film, an adaptation of the young-adult novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a beloved coming-of-age tale published in 1999, will be the next starring role for Ms. Watson, 21, and practically her first that doesn’t involve a cast of wizards and trolls. Though she earned legions of young fans as the plucky Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” series (and as the fashion-forward face of several luxury brands), Ms. Watson has never played a regular girl, let alone a suburban American.…

RIP Hermione, long live Emma Watson! We chat to the superstar about fashion, film and *gulp* life after ‘Potter’ …

As she failed to hold back tears at July’s premiere of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2′, the final instalment of a franchise that transformed her life, Emma Watson had come of age. Dressed in a silver-grey Oscar de la Renta gown, the awkward girl who first walked the red carpet aged 11, now 21, finally bid farewell to Hermione and said, “Hello, Hollywood A-List!” While wearing couture, naturally.

She’s elfin, poised and a natural beauty in a very English way. No wonder, then, that she was appointed the face of Burberry in 2009, succeeding Kate Moss and Agyness Deyn. Plus, this year, she was named brand ambassador for Lancôme.

A style icon and Hollywood superstar, but how does Emma feel about life after ‘Potter’? Company sat down to find out…

It’s finally bye-bye, Hermione. So what’s up next for Emma?
Everything’s up for grabs, really. I’m excited and nervous.

How similar are you to Hermione?
I probably started out more like her and got less like her. Like her, I think with my head – and I’m intellectual, so we’re similar in that way. We’re also very eager to please, have a need for approval and are not the kind of people who want to break the rules. Overall, I think I’m more of a rounded person than she is. She’s very focused on her studies but I think I’m more creative.…

After eight movies-worth of magic spells, fiendish plots, diabolic nastiness and big ol’ butterbeer binges, Harry Potter is finally drawing to a close. It’s a moment to bring a touch of sadness to even the stoniest heart. The film’s three stars, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, mere whippersnappers when they began on The Philosopher’s Stone, are all growed up now and ready to move on to new challenges. Before they did just that, Empire was lucky enough to sit down with the three of them and ask them some questions tricky enough for Peter Pettigrew himself.

Name a spell and explain what it does.
Daniel Radcliffe: ‘Alohomora’ unlocks doors. That’s a vintage spell from the first film. After the fourth film, we barely used any spells except for ‘Expelliarmus’ and ‘Stupefy’. That’s pretty much it! For a good few films those are the only ones that the kids seemed to know. They always beat everyone, which was one of those mysteries for me.

Emma Watson: ‘Wingardium leviosa’ makes objects float or levitate.

Rupert Grint: Yeah, there’s ‘wingardium leviosa’. That’s always been a favourite. It levitates.

Have you ever had tea with JK Rowling?
Radcliffe: Umm, yes! I’m sure I have. I don’t know if it was tea but I certainly had dinner with her. I’m sure I’ve had Diet Coke with her in this room. So yes, I’ve had what qualifies as tea with JK.

Watson: I haven’t had tea with JK. I’ve had orange juice with JK. We had a nice chat in my dressing room and we went through a period where we were emailing, which was nice.…

Emma Watson is walking through a field of buttercups and daisies, dappled in sunlight and dressed in white, on a glorious day in early English summer. “You’re a dandelion head!” says one of the team that surround her for the fashion shoot, as if in encouragement. “Hello, flower!” says photographer Alexi Lubomirski from the top of his stepladder. Watson smiles beatifically, big eyes luminous beneath her gamine auburn crop, but as any conversation with her swiftly reveals, her head isn’t filled with dandelion fluff at all. In the quick breaks from the shoot – wherein she has transformed herself for the camera from the picture of innocence to a raven-haired vamp-siren – she talks about fair-trade fashion, feminism, Kazuo Ishiguro and Catherine of Aragon. For, at 21, Watson – once upon a time the most instantly recognisable little girl in the world – is a force to be reckoned with, and if not quite all grown up, then well on her way to adult maturity.

Still, it’s not hard to feel maternal towards her, at least for anyone like me with children the same age who has watched her grow up on camera as Hermione Granger in the ‘Harry Potter’ films. Hermione was always my favourite – the cleverest girl in Hogwarts, brave and loyal, yes also, in the words of author J.K. Rowling (who has identified her younger self with her heroine), hiding “a lot of insecurity and a great fear of failure”. Cast at the age of nine, Watson has starred in the series for the past decade, with the final instalment released this July; her life is so inextricable linked with the making of the movies that it’s hard to separate where Hermione ends and Emma begins.…

Transcribed by James Stewart.

When Emma arrived day before yesterday at Brown University, among the rest of the students, she raised a big uproar – such a star will live among them! At the same time, however, it was immediately agreed that the campus would respect her privacy. Although … most of her new classmates from first grade grew up on the Harry Potter films, where she starred as Emma’s friend Hermione Granger, so sometimes you must forgive a slip like this. In one lesson, the professor asked students a question and Emma, always bright and always prepared for class, like Hermione, answered correctly. From the back of the auditorium a response immediately sounded: “Twenty points for Gryffindor!” But the truth is that while at Brown, Emma proved to be a talented actress, as Hermione in Gryffindor – a home of the fictional Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Harry and Hermione lived – and found a real home.

“The first year at university I was learning all, I had to get used to a new situation. Then I met great friends, and when I see how things are and what teachers really want, I could hardly wait for the sophomore year.” Emma was also grateful for classmates about how to spoil it here, and how nicely the she was treated. “People at Brown University are really rallying and trying to protect me. They gave out on me, like, I felt that I was part of a group. When I celebrated birthday, I didn´t have to tell anyone not to put photos on Facebook.…

The young actress on saying goodbye to Harry Potter, her future, how her new haircut has made her feel bolder, those Burberry ads and how she is addicted to learning.

How sad was it to say goodbye to Hermione?
It felt sad. She feels like an old friend of mine. So it does feel sad definitely.

Rupert was saying that he didn’t think that you will ever lose touch with each other. Is that something that you agree with?
Oh, I really hope that he never finds me again. No, of course. We grew up together. He’s practically like my brother. There’s no way that we’re losing touch.

Now that everything is completely finished, how do you feel? Liberated, completely sad?
Both. It’s very freeing on the one hand and very sad on the other. It’s both, bittersweet.

You’ve gone to university, obviously, do you imagine taking up acting in the future or are you just seeing what happens?
I just did a movie, finished something last week, “My Week With Marilyn”, which is exciting. No, I think I’ll just keep doing things. But my education is my number one priority at the moment and everything else comes around that really.

How are you enjoying that?
It’s wonderful. I love it. Really do.

How difficult is it to look at a so called normal life cause everybody knows who you are…
The grass is always greener. So for me never having really known a normal life, the idea of sitting around in my dorm having a glass of wine and some pizza is really exciting to me.…

It’s the pixie-cut hair and flawless skin that give her away. Emma Watson is dressed unobtrusively in a cotton flower-print French Connection dress and beige sandals, but she is unmistakable. Fans have accosted her five times in the past half hour alone. Today is the actress’s twenty-first birthday, and she is determined to spend it as she pleases—which means a leisurely mid-morning latte followed by a stroll through the Joan Miró exhibition at London’s Tate Modern.

Emma ignores the stares and continues to chat animatedly about Miró’s willingness to take risks with his art. An avid painter herself—“I love it and have a need to do it”—she can talk eloquently about every picture on the wall. Her favorite is The Farm, a painting once owned by Ernest Hemingway that brought the artist his first taste of success outside Spain. What she admires, Emma tells me, is that Miró was both a draftsman and a painter, unafraid to combine these talents to create something that was simultaneously surreal and hyperreal.

Her words could just as well apply to what is happening around us. The increasingly febrile atmosphere is, frankly, terrifying as word filters through that Hermione Granger, Emma’s alter ego (who will make her final appearance in this month’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2), is in the building. A raucous band of teenagers turns around and heads straight toward her. “It’s time to go,” she says, and we head swiftly for the nearest exit. Outside, a photographer in a tree starts snapping away until she is inside the car and driving away.…

How does it feel to be back in the city you were born in?
Paris always makes me feel nostalgic. My second name is Charlotte, a part of my family still lives here, so every day it’s a thrill.

Where did you grow up?
In the Marais, but at that time it wasn’t the cool district it has become today. The other night my dad brought me out to dinner there and it felt like a completely different place.

Did you manage to have a quiet walk?
More than in London. Only tourists stop me here. Parisian people feel a bit like celebrities themselves, so they don’t take pictures with me.

Is it because of your French origins that Glamour UK named you the most elegant woman in the world?
(Laughs) Maybe. I really like fashion, but also a certain understatement that’s typical of those French girls I see on the streets. My style is a mix of these two things: trying to be tasteful without trying to seek attention at any costs. I love simple things. Few accessories, not much make-up.

Now that you’ve won this title, aren’t you stressed when you dress up in the morning?
Oh, way more than before! (Laughs again) As soon as I see something I like I think: will this dress make me lose the title? But in the end, I just decide things myself.

For example, how long did it take for you to choose this dress?
Just a second, because I wanted to feel comfortable today.…