Since her years as Hermione ended, Emma Watson has fought to assert her own identity. Now that she has found her voice—most notably as a U.N. ambassador—she’s revamping a classic stereotype, the Disney princess, in Beauty and the Beast. Watson talks to Vanity Fair about her metamorphosis from child star to leading woman. Emma Watson and I are standing on the 23rd Street platform of an uptown-bound E train in New York City and we’re littering. Literally. And literature-ly. The 26-year-old actress is scattering hardcover copies of Maya Angelou’s book Mom & Me & Mom throughout the station—tucking them between […]

From the time Emma Watson was a teenager, she struggled with whether she wanted a career as an actor. She had become an international star at age 11, playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise, and while she was grateful for it, she fantasized about a normal life. So as the Potter films wound down, she enrolled at Brown University in 2009 and dropped out of sight for a few years. For a time, she let the press’ (and even a teacher’s) negative input about her future as an actress eat away at her. But the script for The […]

“If I’m honest, I was her,” says Watson. “I was very keen. I was super-eager to please and be good. And I was always kind of bossy.” At age nine, Emma was so bright and winning that she was chosen from tens of thousands of girls to play Hermione. Ten years later, Watson was in 2009 the highest-paid actress in Hollywood and has found herself in a place even stranger than anything Rowling could have dreamed up: Brown University. “It was just awful,” she recalls thinking at first, during freshman week. “I was like, I must be mad. Why am […]