T Qatar 15 th Issue 2012

I’ll start putting a team together.’ ’’ There are inchoate glints here of a future Hollywood mover and shaker, but, speaking to Watson, they were offset by an impression of someone still looking for nurture in each new temporary family she encounters — whether it be the Potter circus, the cast of ‘‘Wallflower’’ or at Brown. I suspect it may be this emotional connection she seeks quite as much as fulfillment through acting. She certainly has no desire for the glitzy lifestyle her wealth could afford her, this she made perfectly clear — and I believe her. (Watson did talk to me a little about her roles, but I simply can’t hear actors when they speak about their work — the world around me grows sort of misty, and often I swoon away altogether. A famous Shakespearean actor was once talking to me over lunch about his Lear, and I very nearly put my eye out with the top of the pepper grinder.)

I was also touched by Watson’s tales of coming to realize the horrific extent of her face recognition as a child star. She told me that up until she was 15 or 16 she still took the bus from Oxford to London, determined to be just an ordinary girl — this was her strange form of rebellion — but that it became too much when everyone on the bus was either talking about or at her.

Nowadays, while she can walk around fairly happily in quiet areas of London or New York, there are plenty of other places that are off-limits: ‘‘If I went to somewhere busy, I wouldn’t last very long. I can’t go to a museum, I’ll last 10 or 15 minutes in a museum. The problem is that when one person asks for a photograph, then someone sees a flash goes off, then everyone else sort of . . . it’s sort of like a domino effect. And then very quickly the situation starts to get out of control to a point where I can’t manage it on my own.’’ I suggested to her that with fame there comes a point when you decide that whatever the downside of people gawping at you in the street, there remains an upside, and I was still more touched by the trenchancy of her reply: that it’s more just like ‘‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’’

Nowadays Emma Watson is set to make a lot more lemonade, and as I left her I thought: I damn well hope it’s potable — then checked myself. After all, why does it matter to me?

Unlike with her earlier screen incarnation, I will not be compelled by my children to witness these ones. No, I can decide to watch her movies or not, as I choose, just as she has chosen to become a real grown-up actress.

And that, surely, is what cinematic art should be: an act between consenting adults. n 117