CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR

Christiane Amanpour was born on January 12, 1958, in London, England. The daughter of an English mother and Iranian father and the oldest of four sisters, she spent time in Tehran, Iran, while growing up. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor of arts in journalism. Amanpour is CNN’s chief international correspondent and anchor of Amanpour, a nightly foreign affairs program on CNN International. In addition, she is the global affairs anchor for ABC News, providing international analysis of important issues of the day for ABC News programs and platforms, and anchoring primetime documentaries on international subjects. Amanpour began her career as a journalist at CNN in 1983 as an entry-level assistant on the network’s international assignment desk in Atlanta. She worked her way up to correspondent in CNN’s New York bureau before becoming an international correspondent in 1990. During her combined tenures at CNN and ABC News, she has interviewed most of the world’s top leaders, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the presidents of Afghanistan and Sudan, Prime Ministers of Israel and Presidents of the Palestinian Authority, and Moammar Gadhafi and Hosni Mubarak during the Arab Spring. After the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Amanpour was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. From 1998 to 2018, Amanpour was married to American James Rubin, a former US Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department during the Clinton administration. They had one son in 2000, Darius John Rubin. Amanpour has earned every major television journalism award including an inaugural Television Academy Honor, nine News and Documentary Emmy Awards, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards, the Courage in Journalism Award, an Edward R. Murrow award, and a Giants of Broadcasting honor from the Library of American Broadcasting.

"It's about whether you give into fear or whether you push through it."