Christiane Amanpour
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Christiane Amanpour (born January 12, 1958) (in Persian: کریستین امانپور) is the chief international correspondent for CNN.
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[edit] Biography
Shortly after her birth in London, her British mother Patricia, and her father Mohammed, an Iranian airline executive, moved the family to Tehran. The Amanpours led a privileged life under the regime of the Shah of Iran. At age 11, she returned to England to attend first the Holy Cross Convent School in Buckinghamshire, England, and then the New Hall School, an exclusive Roman Catholic girls' school. Her family had to flee Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Christiane moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island.
After graduation, she worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1983, she was hired by CNN. In 1989, she was posted to Frankfurt, Germany, where she reported on the democratic revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe at the time. However, it was her coverage of the Persian Gulf War that followed Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990 that made her famous. Thereafter, she reported from the Bosnian war and many other conflict zones. From 1996-2005, she contracted with CBS to file four to five in-depth, international news reports a year as a special contributor on that network's newsmagazine program, 60 Minutes. These reports garnered a Peabody Award in 1998, adding to the Peabody she was awarded in 1993.
In 1993, she was also awarded the George Polk Award for Television Reporting. Again in 1996 she, along with Anita Pratap, received the George Polk Award for Foreign Television Reporting for their story "Battle for Afghanistan," which aired on CNN.
Based out of CNN's London bureau, Amanpour is one of the most recognized international correspondents on American television. Her willingness to work in dangerous conflict zones has reportedly made her one of the more highly (if not the highest) paid field reporters in the world. She speaks English, Persian, and French fluently. Forbes magazine has named her one of the 100 Most Powerful Women.
She has had many memorable moments in her career, one of them was while interviewing Yasser Arafat, in March 2002, when he walked out of the studio.[1]
[edit] Personal life
Her sister, Lizzy Amanpour is a producer for British television broadcaster, Channel 4.
In 1998, she married James Rubin, who at the time was spokesman for the US State Department. A son, Darius John Rubin, was born in the year 2000. The family resides in London, where Rubin works for Sky TV.
[edit] Notes
- She is a director on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists
- In 2006, she became an honorary citizen of the city of Sarajevo.
- Christiane Amanpour is generally critical of the administration of George W. Bush. In her documentary Telling the Truth: The Best in Broadcast Journalism, she solicits and encourages critical opinions from journalists who criticize the Iraq War and the Bush Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina.
- One of her college housemates was John F Kennedy Jr, whom she remained close friends with until his death in 1999.
[edit] Trivia
- In the second episode of the first season of the WB (now CW) show Gilmore Girls, one of the main characters, Rory Gilmore (at that point a high school student on her way to becoming a journalist), mentions Amanpour as her role model and rejects the alternatives given sarcastically by her school's headmaster: "Cokie Roberts, (...) Oprah, Rosie or one of the women from 'The View'." In another Gilmore Girls episode, Rory has a nightmare and her mother inquires, "Was it the one where you meet Christiane Amanpour and she's really stupid?" On the 7th season's last episode, Christiane Amanpour will make an appearance.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Christiane Amanpour Interview
- CNN Biography
- 2000 Murrow Awards Ceremony Speech
- Oprah Winfrey Show Interview - Reporters' Notebooks
| 60 Minutes Correspondents |
|---|
| Christiane Amanpour • Ed Bradley • Anderson Cooper • Katie Couric • Steve Kroft • Lara Logan • Scott Pelley • Dan Rather • Harry Reasoner • Morley Safer • Diane Sawyer • Bob Simon • Lesley Stahl • Meredith Vieira • Mike Wallace |
Categories: 1958 births | Living people | People from London | British Iranians | Iranian Americans | Peabody Award winners | University of Rhode Island alumni | British reporters and correspondents | American reporters and correspondents | American television journalists | British expatriates in the United States
