Harry Potter fans will know Hermione Granger was given a magical device that allowed her to travel back in time to change events and stop disasters occurring.

If only Emma Watson, the actress who earned £20 million playing Hermione, could do the same, she might not find her past catching up with her — as it did last week.

The UN Women’s ambassador was branded a ‘fake feminist’ and even a racist after it emerged that she fronted an advertising campaign for skin-lightening products made by the cosmetics giant Lancome, for which she was a highly-paid ‘brand ambassador’.

Emma Watson was branded a ‘fake feminist’ and even a racist after it emerged that she fronted an advertising campaign for skin-lightening products

Encouraging dark-skinned women to look whiter is obviously a deeply contentious issue and the 25-year-old English rose might have wilted under the ferocity of the criticism.

Her spokesman said he couldn’t comment on ‘previous contractual arrangements’. His client, he added, ‘no longer participates in advertising beauty products, which do not always reflect the diverse beauty of all women’.

But this is not the only time Miss Watson has been accused of inconsistency — to put it mildly — as we shall see...

Her magic millions

A sensitive subject. Watson likes to present herself as unaffected by her estimated £48 million fortune, insisting she didn’t realise how rich she was until her father — like her mother, a wealthy lawyer — told Watson on her 18th birthday that the Potter films had made her £20 million.

‘I had no idea. I felt sick, very emotional,’ she has said. But could the fiercely ambitious and intelligent teenager, who at 15 became the youngest celebrity to grace the front cover of U.S. Vogue, and who was already signed up with the model agency Storm, really have been so ignorant?

She quickly got over her queasiness and plunged into a string of lucrative fashion and make-up advertising and promotion deals, including for Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana, that netted her millions more.

Her 2009 contract to be the face of Burberry was reportedly worth £1 million a year alone, and she was also the face of Lancome (Vanity Fair magazine estimated that Watson earned £19 million in 2009 alone).

Fashion insiders say that Watson, who doubled her Harry Potter earnings to £2 million for each film after she and her parents dragged their feet over agreeing to make the final three instalments, is very business-savvy.

But in interviews she likes to come across as a free spirit who has little time for material things.

‘I need to find a way to always feel safe and at home within myself,’ she told Australian Elle, explaining her decision to become a yoga and meditation teacher, ‘because I can never rely on a physical place.’

For the record, she has rather more ‘physical places’ than most of us, with three multi-million-pound homes — a £3 million house in North London, a luxury flat in Manhattan and a chalet in the French ski resort of Meribel, recently estimated to be worth up to £3 million.

Feminist issues

Appointed a United Nations Women Goodwill Ambassador in 2014, Watson declared: ‘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.’

Watson won rapturous applause for a speech at the UN in New York a few months later in which she issued a ‘formal invitation’ to men to join the struggle for women’s rights. She urged them to get in touch with their sensitive side, saying: ‘If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive.’

How different this sentiment was to one she made two years earlier, when she said she doubted she would ever date a British man again because they were too unassertive.

‘English guys are very restrained,’ she complained. American men, on the other hand, came up to her and suggested a date, telling her: ‘Let’s do it.’ She found their boldness attractive.

Style humbug

Emma Watson wearing Ralph Lauren

Do as I say, not as I wear, is the Watson maxim when it comes to her great passion — fashion.

After modelling extensively for Burberry and Chanel, the diehard clothes horse did a dramatic about-turn.

Launching her own fashion range for the fair trade and environmentally sustainable clothes company People Tree, she attacked the enormous damage that the mainstream fashion industry was doing to the Third World.

However, when her People Tree clothes barely sold, critics pointed out that it might have helped if Watson had actually worn the stuff on the red carpet or at public events. She didn’t.

One possible clue as to why she felt that ethical fashion was for other people?

‘I’m interested in fair trade fashion,’ she said, months before the People Tree deal. ‘But it’s hard as, to be honest, the stuff’s kind of ugly.’

Fame game

‘There’s a whole new definition to celebrity now,’ she told Radio Times. ‘That’s why you see a lot of actors blanching at being associated with that word “celebrity” because it’s something that isn’t really associated with having a craft.’

Perish the thought that Watson is a celebrity rather than an actor. But you wouldn’t be alone if you couldn’t name one film she has been in since the Harry Potter juggernaut came to a halt in 2011.

Quite how much she has suffered from international fame is difficult to tell, as her story changes.

In November 2010, she told a U.S. magazine that she once burst into uncontrollable tears when a fellow student at America’s Brown University (where Watson studied for an English literature degree after Harry Potter) asked her for an autograph.

The following June, dismissing reports that she had left Brown because she felt bullied, she told the Sunday Times: ‘I’ve never been asked for an autograph on campus.’

Watson has long expressed disdain for celebrities who trade on their fame, but was accused of doing much the same in January when her Harry Potter co-star, Alan Rickman, died.

Within hours, she had posted on Twitter a quote from him in which he extolled the virtues of feminism, prompting a wave of accusations that she was exploiting his death to advance her feminist agenda.

Flawless look

Watson has graced hundreds of magazine covers and fronted many beauty and fashion ads. In some, her image was digitally altered.

But on this subject she prefers to have her cake and eat it. She told a newspaper: ‘With airbrushing and digital manipulation, fashion can project an unobtainable image that’s dangerously unhealthy.’

True. But why, then, does Watson — who claims she suffered terribly when younger from insecurity about her looks — go along with it?

‘I’m more interested in women who aren’t perfect,’ she says.

Yet her Lancome adverts render Emma’s skin so poreless as to make her look computer-generated.

EIGHT PAIRS OF SHOES (AND THE REST) Emma Watson said: ‘I’ve got about eight pairs of shoes and that’s it' ‘I’ve got about eight pairs of shoes and that’s it.’ So claimed Emma as she promoted 2013 film The Bling Ring, in which she played a girl who burgled the homes of Paris Hilton and other celebrities. While shopaholic Hilton was a slave to consumerism, Watson suggested, she had the footwear selection of a nun. Yet given her presence on so many red carpets, in so many pairs of stilettos, even her devoted fans were dubious. Recent photos show Watson in at least 24 pairs of designer shoes, worth a total of £14,000 (not that she had to buy the shoes — most were loaned by stylists). Advertisement

Muscle men

Just as she was lecturing her 21 million Twitter followers and the rest of the world about how men were ‘imprisoned by gender stereotypes’ of aggression and machismo, Watson was dating a fellow Oxford student who was the epitome of machismo.

Hulking Matthew Janney, whom she met while spending a year at Worcester College on an exchange programme from Brown, was in the Oxford rugby team and had been named ‘Oxford’s most eligible bachelor’.

Watson has a penchant for male ‘gender stereotypes’, though, as earlier this year it was reported that she had found love with William Knight, a strapping American tech entrepreneur whose pastimes include marathon running and long gym workouts.

Last month, possibly in a last-ditch attempt to throw off her prim, self-contained image, Watson revealed that she has subscribed to a sexual pleasure research website. OMGYES.com aims to educate men and women on how to perform better in bed.

Luvvie labours

‘Acting was never about money for me . . . I can be very picky,’ says Watson. She has admitted that she never has to work again after the Potter films — which may be just as well, given the dire reviews for her latest film, Regression, with Ethan Hawke.

Her next film, Colonia, about a Chilean cult, is likely to bypass cinemas almost entirely and be released on pay-per-view TV.

After vowing that she would never sign up to another big budget film franchise like the Potter epics, Watson has done just that by agreeing to star in film adaptations of a new fantasy novel trilogy that begins with The Queen of the Tearling, described as a female version of Game Of Thrones.

Actress Emma Watson's latest film, Regression, with Ethan Hawke has been given dire reviews

Next year, she will play Belle in a Disney live-action adaptation of Beauty And The Beast. It’s hardly the cutting-edge film work she had led us to expect, but it will certainly pay well.

Meanwhile, polymath Watson has been hinting that she is fed up with acting.

In February, she said she was taking a year off for ‘personal development’ such as yoga, meditation and reading a book a week.

‘It almost feels like the chemistry and structure of my brain is changing so rapidly sometimes,’ she proclaimed. ‘It feels as if I’m struggling to keep up with myself.’

It all sounds rather like clever-clogs, over-earnest Hermione.