As one of the older members of Oxford University’s student population, actress Emma Watson strikes a somewhat incongruous figure as she potters around its cloisters and quads.

In recent months the 35-year-old, who is studying for a DPhil – Oxford’s version of a PhD – in creative writing, has been a regular sight at New College whose 14th century buildings, ironically, once served as a film location for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Mingling with undergraduates close to half her age, she has been spotted in the college library, at the helm as cox for one of the women’s boat teams during the Oxford ‘Summer Eights’ regatta and at the college’s recent £250-a-head ‘La Vie En Rose’ Parisian-themed ball (where one fusty don was heard muttering about how under-dressed she was).

The Daily Mail has also been told that Watson was a guest at an event hosted by the secretive, ultra-posh Piers Gaveston society, a scandalous dining club founded in the 1970s by brewery heir Valentine Guinness and alleged to have been the scene of ‘Piggate’ claims about former PM David Cameron.

More, later, of multi-millionaire Watson’s rarified existence in the City of Dreaming Spires, where she lives in her nine-bedroomed mansion in Jericho, drives an Audi and recently submitted a one-woman play about being at a ‘normal university as a super famous person’ to help others understand ‘how weird it is being me’.

Life took a rather grittier turn for the star this week when she was subjected to an unprecedented attack by Harry Potter author JK Rowling following a tense, five-year stand-off between actress and author over Rowling’s stance on trans rights and Watson’s criticisms of the writer whose books turned her into a child star with an estimated £42million fortune.

Rowling raged online that Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the films of her books, is ‘ignorant of how ignorant she is’, has been blinded by wealth and fame and has ‘so little experience of real life’.

The reason for this fiery outburst? According to 60-year-old Rowling, comments made by Watson on a podcast last week – when in an outpouring that lasted two and a half hours she gushed that she still loved the best-selling author and refused to ‘cancel her out’ despite their differences in opinion – finally pushed her over the edge.

Writing on X, Rowling accused the actress-turned-student of ‘cosying up’ to a movement that ‘regularly calls for a friend’s assassination’. Her own feelings towards her ‘former friend’, she said, had soured after Watson publicly poured ‘more petrol on the flames’ of the abuse she had suffered.

But, without a doubt, the author’s most stinging rebuke was that the former child star had ‘never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame’.

‘I wasn’t a millionaire at fourteen,’ said Rowling who, as a single mother, once famously struggled to make ends meet while living in an Edinburgh council flat.

‘I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.’

Many of those privileges have already been well-documented. The daughter of high-flying lawyers – Emma’s father also owns a French vineyard producing £30 bottles of ‘Domaine Watson’ Chablis and Irancy wine – Paris-born Watson attended £33,000-a-year Dragon School and then Headington School where fees for boarders can reach £50,000 a year.

In 1999, at the age of nine, film scouts cast her as bossy, know-it-all Hermione after eight rounds of auditions. It was a decision which would change her life almost overnight. Over twenty years later, it remains as gilded today.

Having matriculated as a member of Lady Margaret Hall in 2023 before moving to New College, Watson is as sheltered as ever from the Muggle world.

When not studying creative writing or relaxing at her nine-bedroom home in the city’s charming Jericho quarter, she has been seen enjoying picnics and painting on the banks of the river and at five-course dinners hosted by Bacchus, the Oxford University Wine Society.

While her attendance at a ‘Piers Gav’ dinner set tongues wagging last term, she mooted the idea with student pals of setting up her own eccentric secret club, in which they would compete to leave a slipper on top of the city’s highest buildings.

After being banned for speeding around town in her Audi, she has also become an avid cyclist. She hired more than a dozen bikes for the ‘party on wheels’ she hosted over the summer, decorating the wicker baskets with flowers before she and her friends set off for The Perch, a bucolic river-side pub on the outskirts of the city.

She has been romantically linked to a couple of male students including fellow post-graduate Kieran Brown who she was spotted kissing after splitting from Brandon Green, son of former Top Shop tycoon Sir Philip Green.

Now 35 – the same age Rowling was when the author first walked the red carpet alongside 11-year-old Watson and her child co-stars, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, at the Leicester Square premier of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in November 2001 – Emma’s charmed life couldn’t be more removed from the existence Rowling knew as a struggling writer and single mother when she first tasted success.

Yet, as photographs from the time show, Rowling clearly doted on the young child stars who brought her fictional characters to life on screen and became mini millionaires almost overnight. The tongue lashing Rowling dished out this week would have been impossible to imagine back then.

As the novelist put it during her online tirade this week: ‘When you’ve known people since they were ten years old it’s hard to shake a certain protectiveness. 

‘Until quite recently, I hadn’t managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio.’

Over the course of a decade, Watson appeared in all eight Harry Potter films. The last, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, was released in July 2011. By then she was studying English Literature at Brown University in the US. An armed bodyguard accompanied her to her graduation ceremony in 2014.

Still close to Rowling, the then 24-year-old interviewed Rowling for Wonderland Magazine the same year, describing the author as ‘funny, kind, warm and real’. She was also made UN Goodwill Ambassador for Women and promoted their ‘HeForShe’ gender equality campaign.

‘Women’s rights are something so inextricably linked with who I am, so deeply personal and rooted in my life that I can’t imagine an opportunity more exciting,’ she said at the time.

Back then, she and Rowling, who has donated millions to charity, appeared aligned on issue of women’s rights. In 2000, she set up the Volant Trust which supports women, children and young people suffering social deprivation in Scotland. 

Her charity Lumos, set up in 2005 and named after a light-producing spell from her Harry Potter books, seeks to end the institutionalisation of children around the world and was, at one time, also supported by Watson.

So where did it all go wrong for the duo who just as might as easily have become sisters in arms as women at war?

The last time they are thought to have been photographed together was in August 2019 at Rowling’s 54th birthday fancy dress party.

Watson, dressed up as Wonder Woman, shared the snap of herself and Rowling, wearing a velvet black dress and gory make-up, on Instagram, writing: ‘Sexy and scary! You smashed this. All the love to you, Jo. Happy Birthday!!!!’

Rowling had already drawn attention to her growing interest in the transgender debate in June 2019 by following the social media of Magdalena Berns, a terminally-ill radical lesbian feminist who co-founded For Women Scotland and campaigned against reform to the Gender Recognition Act 2004. Watson said nothing about it at the time.

Nor did she react when, in December 2019, just four months after her birthday party, Rowling wrote the tweet that would launch her headlong into the gender identity firestorm.

She expressed her support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who lost her job after tweeting that transgender women could not change their biological sex, writing on X: ‘Dress however you please. Live your best life in peace. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?’

In June 2020, Rowling posted a link to an article headlined ‘Creating a more equal post-Covid world for people who menstruate’, commenting: ‘People who menstruate’, I’m sure their used to be a word for those people. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

She added: ‘If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of so many to meaningfully discuss their lives.’

The ensuing backlash led to a 3,600-word essay in which she outlined her concerns over the ‘new trans activism’ and those who said ‘that women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves’.

Actor Daniel Radcliffe condemned Rowling’s views in a post written on a website for Trevor Project, a not-for-profit LGBTQ young people’s suicide prevention organisation he had supported for more than a decade.

‘Transgender women are women,’ he said in June 2020. ‘Any statement to the contrary ‘erases the identity and dignity of transgender people’. He said he was ‘deeply sorry’ to those who ‘feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished’ because of Rowling’s statements.

His decision to speak out against the woman who helped turn him into a global superstar appeared to prompt Watson, already outspoken on issues as varied as climate change, sustainable fashion and racial equality, to follow suit.

‘Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned,’ she wrote on X, in a clear rebuttal to Rowling.

Watson went on to become a cheerleader for – and a donor to – the youth trans charity Mermaids UK which published a blog post entitled ‘Gutted by JK Rowling, saved by Emma Watson’. 

The charity was told last year by the Charity Commission to stop giving chest binders to children without parental permission and to be clearer about the risks of puberty blockers.

The years which followed saw Rowling inundated with online hate amid accusations of transphobia.

In November 2021, after three trans activists posted a photo of themselves in front of her Edinburgh mansion which revealed her address, she said she had received so many death, rape and torture threats ‘I could paper the house with them’.

In the midst of the vile online hate campaign against the author, Watson delivered what was widely seen as a barbed dig at the author. While presenting an award at the Baftas in March 2022, the actress said she was there for ‘all the witches’ before appearing to add, under her breath, ‘bar one’.

Rowling said this week that the comment marked a ‘turning point for me’ but added that it had ‘a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself’.

That postscript was the handwritten note Watson sent via a third party to Rowling, which said: ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’, even though she had her number and could have called.

It came, said Rowling, ‘at a time when my personal security measures had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family’s safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness.’

But it was Watson’s comments last week when speaking to Jay Shetty, host of the ‘On Purpose’ mental health podcast which ultimately Rowling led to hit back directly.

They came five months after the UK Supreme Court ruled that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the 2010 Equality Act referred to biological sex. Rowling described the decision as a ‘victory for common sense’.

Watson’s own response was a statement in May on Instagram, quoting author Matt Haig: ‘I like me best when I am not ignoring fascism.’

Last week, she appeared to be in a more conciliatory mood when she told Shetty that her support for trans rights did not mean she had turned against the woman who had shaped her life.

‘I really don’t believe that by having had that experience and holding the love and support and views that I have, mean that I can’t and don’t treasure Jo.’

Rowling said it was ‘a change of tack I suspect she’s adopted because she’s noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was’.

Watson also faced criticism from Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns for human rights charity Sex Matters, who said: ‘I think she’s going to find that you can’t sit on the fence.’

The actress, who also starred in Beauty and the Beast and Little Women, hasn’t responded to the latest twist in her 26-year-old relationship with Rowling.

She told Shelly: ‘I just don’t want to say anything that continues to weaponise a really toxic debate and conversation. The way that the conversation is being had feels really painful to me.’

What seems clear is that the verbal spat between the pair is not over yet, however much Watson might wish she could wave Hermione’s magic wand and shout ‘Expelliarmus!’ to make it go away.