early life and education
Watson was born in Paris, France, the daughter of English lawyers Jacqueline Luesby and Chris Watson. Watson lived in Maisons-Laffitte near Paris until she was five. Her parents divorced when she was young, and Watson moved to England to live with her mother in Oxfordshire while spending weekends at her father's house in London. Watson has said she speaks some French, though "not as well" as she used to. After moving to Oxford with her mother and brother, she attended the Dragon School, remaining there until 2003. From age six, she wanted to become an actress, and trained at the Oxford branch of Stagecoach Theatre Arts, a part-time theatre school where she studied singing, dancing, and acting.
By age 10, Watson had performed in Stagecoach productions and school plays including Arthur: The Young Years and The Happy Prince, but she had never acted professionally before the Harry Potter series. After the Dragon School, Watson moved on to Headington School, Oxford. While on film sets, she and her peers were tutored for up to five hours a day. In June 2006, she took GCSE school examinations in 10 subjects, achieving eight A* and two A grades. In May 2007, she took AS levels in English, Geography, Art, and History of Art. The next year, she dropped History of Art to pursue the three A levels, receiving an A grade in each subject.
Watson took a gap year after leaving high school, to film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows beginning in February 2009, but said she intended to continue her studies and later confirmed that she had chosen Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In March 2011, after 18 months at the university, Watson announced that she was deferring her course for "a semester or two", though she attended Worcester College, Oxford during the 2011–12 academic year as part of the Visiting Student Programme.
Watson told Ellen DeGeneres just before graduation that it took five years to finish instead of four because, owing to her acting work, she "ended up taking two full semesters off". On 25 May 2014, she graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's degree in English literature. In 2013, she became certified to teach yoga and meditation. As part of this certification, she attended a week-long meditation course at a Canadian facility, in which residents are not allowed to speak, in order "to figure out how to be at home with myself". She told Elle Australia that an uncertain future meant finding "a way to always feel safe and at home within myself. Because I can never rely on a physical place."