British actress
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- Emma Watson - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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Also known as: Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson
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Emma Watson
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- In full:
- Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson
- Born:
- April 15, 1990, Paris, France (age 34)
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Emma Watson (born April 15, 1990, Paris, France) is a British actress and activist who was perhaps best known for playing the young wizard Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films. She also garnered attention as a spokesperson for women’s equality.
Watson was born in Paris to British parents who divorced when she was young. She and her brother went to live with their mother in Oxfordshire, England. While a child, Watson decided she wanted to be an actress. Besides attending school, she took acting and singing classes. She also appeared in several school plays.
Watson began acting in earnest in 1999 after she auditioned for a part in the film adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001). She won the role of smart and logical Hermione, one of Harry Potter’s best friends. The film was a box-office hit, and Watson reprised her role in the franchise’s other movies: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011).
After the Potter films ended, Watson began to look for more mature roles. Her first major part was in the drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012), in which she played a high-school senior who becomes friends with a clinically depressed freshman. She subsequently appeared in the crime drama The Bling Ring (2013), the historical thriller The Colony (also known as Colonia; 2015), and the sci-fi thriller The Circle (2017). These films had limited success at the box-office, but Watson had another blockbuster hit with the live-action Disney adaptation (2017) of Beauty and the Beast. In 2019 she appeared as Meg March in Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed Little Women, which was based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic children’s book.
Meanwhile, in the midst of her acting career, Watson pursued a college degree. In 2009 she began attending Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She took time off as needed for filming, and she also studied for a year at the University of Oxford. Watson graduated from Brown in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. That year she was named a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She was an advocate for women’s rights and gender equality. From 2016 to 2020 Watson ran an online feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf, to read and discuss books by and about women.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
