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Christiane Amanpour

Early years

Shortly after her birth in London, her father Mohammad, an Iranian airline executive and her British mother Patricia, moved the family to Tehran. The Amanpours led a privileged life under the government of the Shah of Iran. She returned to England in 1969 and her family fled from Iran during the Islamic Revolution. She attended and graduated from an all-girls school, New Hall School in Chelmsford, Essex, England.

Amanpour moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island. During her time there she worked in the News Department at WBRU-FM in Providence, Rhode Island. Amanpour graduated from the university summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Journalism degree in 1983.

Career

Before 1983, she worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, as an electronic graphics designer. In 1983, she was hired by CNN as a desk assistant on the Foreign Desk. In 1989, she was assigned to work in Frankfurt, Germany, where she reported on the democratic revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe at the time.

Following Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990, Amanpour's reports of the Persian Gulf War brought her wide notice while also taking the network to a new level of news coverage. Thereafter, she reported from the Bosnian war and many other conflict zones. Her emotional delivery from Sarajevo during the Siege of Sarajevo led some viewers and critics to question her professional objectivity, claiming that many of her reports were unjustified and favoured the Bosnian Muslims, to which she replied, "There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing."

From 1996–2005, she was contracted by 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt to file four to five in-depth, international news reports a year as a special contributor. These reports garnered a Peabody Award in 1998, adding to the Peabody she was awarded in 1993. Hewitt's successor, Jeff Fager was not a fan of her work and terminated her contract.

Based out of CNN's London bureau, Amanpour is one of the most recognized international correspondents on American television, with a willingness to work in dangerous conflict zones. She speaks English, Persian and French fluently.

She has had many memorable moments in her career, one of them being a telephone interview with Yasser Arafat during the siege on his compound in March 2002, during which Chairman Arafat hung up on her.

She interviewed North Korea's chief nuclear negotiator Kim Kye Gwan on February 26 2008, after the New York Philharmonic visit to North Korea.

Amanpour is a member of Committee to Protect Journalists or CPJ along with many other notable journalists.

Amanpour appeared in the Gilmore Girls, as herself, in the series finale. Throughout the series Amanpour was an inspiration to aspiring journalist, Rory Gilmore. In July 2009, she appeared in Harper's Bazaar magazine with the title "Christiane Amanpour Gets a High-Fashion Makeover".

CNN

Amanpour is CNN's chief international correspondent based in New York. In her 18 years as an international correspondent, Amanpour has reported on all the major crises from the world's many hotspots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iran, India, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans and the United States during Hurricane Katrina.

Amanpour joined 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. Her first major assignment was the Gulf War, and she has since covered wars, famine, genocide and natural disasters around the globe.

She has secured exclusive interviews with world leaders from the Middle East to Europe to Africa and beyond, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria, among others. After 9/11 she was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Her body of work has earned an inaugural Television Academy Honor, nine News and Documentary Emmys, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards, the Courage in Journalism Award, an Edward R. Murrow award and other major journalism awards, as well as honorary degrees from The American University of Paris, Georgetown University, New York University, Smith College, Emory University and the University of Michigan.

In 2007, Amanpour was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for her "highly distinguished, innovative contribution" to the field of journalism. In 1998, the city of Sarajevo named her an honorary citizen for her "personal contribution to spreading the truth" during the Bosnia war from 1992 to 1995. In a special episode of Larry King Live that was broadcast from London, Amanpour had an interview with her own husband Jamie Rubin about the situation in Iran (June 20, 2009).

On September 21, 2009 Amanpour started her own daily series, aptly titled "Amanpour".

Personal life

Amanpour has been married to James Rubin, former Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department, since 1998. Their son Darius John Rubin was born in 2000. The family resides in New York City.

She shared an apartment, on the east side of Providence, with John Kennedy Jr. while he was attending Brown University and she was attending the University of Rhode Island.