JANET STREET-PORTER: Thanks to Harry Potter Emma Watson has a magical life most young women would kill for, so why is she so deeply irritating?
I hardly remember turning 30, it was no big deal. I was on my second marriage, my TV career was starting to go well - but I’d worked my arse off for the preceding 12 years to get on. There wasn’t time to worry about another birthday.
For multi-millionaire actress Emma Watson, though, facing up to the big three-o next April is fraught with ‘stress’ and an ‘incredible amount of anxiety’.
Emma Watson
FOR GOD’S SAKE, what’s stressful about already having enough money for the rest of your life, being blessed with a first rate brain, perfect features, a cut glass accent (great for getting a good job and roles) and benefiting from unswerving support from middle class parents
Where’s the stress in forging a non-stop career from the age of nine, one which has brought you worldwide fame and given you access to world leaders, pop stars and anyone famous who’s a Harry Potter fan?
Somehow, in spite of all her good points and natural assets, Emma Watson manages to be one of the most annoying people around. She uses every public forum to give us a little manifesto, telling other women how to think, what we should be doing to save the planet, how to stop injustices and bring about equality for all. Even nice Lorraine Kelly has admitted she finds Emma ‘just a wee bit irritating’ - which says it all.
In her latest interview (in British Vogue) Emma has (once again) come up with terminology so pretentious it could have come from the mouth of Gwyneth Paltrow, that other self-appointed spokesperson for global womankind.
Emma describes herself as ‘self-partnered’, ie single. Using the word single is just too crass and low rent for a quasi-intellectual like this one, who studied at Brown University in the US and Oxford.
Emma is stressed (it seems) because of ‘subliminal messaging…if you do not have a husband, if you do not have a baby, and you are turning 30, and you’re not in some incredibly secure, stable place in your career, or you’re just figuring things out…there’s this incredible amount of anxiety’.
In spite of being photographed with a steady stream of very eligible men she says: ‘I’m very happy (being single). I call it self-partnered’. For some shallow people (like me) self-partnering sounds like an exotic form of masturbation, but nothing that low rent would cross this paragon’s mind.
With unerring regularity, Emma turns every chat into a baffling discourse on her brand of modern feminism. Talking about her role in the new Hollywood movie of Little Women alongside Laura Dern and Meryl Streep, she says ‘we met in activist spaces, so we had this allyship and solidarity as activists that had been part of a certain movement before we ever worked together’.