Christiane Amanpour, CBE (Persian: ﮐﺮﯾﺴﺘﯿﻦ ﺍﻣﺎﻥﭘﻮﺭ, translit. Kristiāne Amānpur; born January 12, 1958) is a British-Iranian journalist and television host. Amanpour is the Chief International Correspondent for CNN and host of CNN International’s nightly interview program Amanpour.
Amanpour is also a Global Affairs Anchor of ABC News. In 2013, she moved from New York City to live permanently in London, England, with her husband, former US Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin, and their teenage son.
Born in London, England, Amanpour was raised in Tehran. Her father, Mahmoud Amanpour, is a Muslim from Iran; her mother, Patricia Hill, is a Christian from England. She is fluent in English and Persian.
After completing the larger part of her elementary education in Iran, she was sent by her parents to boarding school in England when she was 11. She attended Holy Cross Convent, an all-girls school located in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, and then, at age 16, New Hall School, in Chelmsford, Essex.
Christiane and her family returned to England not long after the Islamic Revolution began. She has stressed that they were not forced to leave the country, but were actually returning to England due to the Iran–Iraq War. The family ultimately remained in England, finding it difficult to return to Iran.
After leaving New Hall, Amanpour moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island’s Harrington School of Communication and Media . During her time there, she worked in the news department at WBRU-FM in Providence, Rhode Island. She also worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island, as an electronic graphics designer. In 1983, Amanpour graduated from the university summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. degree in journalism.
In 1983, she was hired by CNN on the foreign desk in Atlanta, Georgia, as an entry-level desk assistant. During her early years as a correspondent, Amanpour was given her first major assignment covering the Gulf War[dubious ], which led to her being transferred in 1986 to Eastern Europe to report on the fall of European communism. In 1989, she was assigned to work in Frankfurt, Germany, where she reported on the democratic revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe at the time. Through this position, she was able to move up in the company and by 1990 served as a correspondent for CNN’s New York bureau.
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 other conflict zones. Because of her emotional delivery from Sarajevo during the Siege of Sarajevo, viewers and critics questioned 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.” Amanpour gained a reputation for being fearless during the Gulf and Bosnian wars and for reporting from conflict areas.
From 1992 to 2010, Amanpour was CNN’s chief international correspondent as well as the anchor of Amanpour, a daily CNN interview program that aired 2009–2010. Amanpour has reported on major crises from many of the world’s hotspots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans and from the United States during Hurricane Katrina. 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.
Additional interview partners are Hillary Clinton, Nicolás Maduro, Hassan Rouhani and Moammar Gadhafi.
She also conducted interviews with Constantine II of Greece, Reza Pahlavi, Ameera al-Taweel and actress Angelina Jolie.
From 1996 to 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 her a Peabody Award in 1998 (she had earlier been awarded one in 1993). Hewitt’s successor Jeff Fager was not a fan of her work and terminated her contract.
She has had many memorable moments in her television career, one of them in a live telephone interview with Yasser Arafat during the siege on his compound in March 2002, in which Arafat gave tough responses: “Are you asking me why am I under complete siege? You’re a wonderful journalist. You have to respect your profession.” and “You have to be accurately when you are speaking with General Yasser Arafat. Be quiet!”, and finished by hanging up on her.
Amanpour is a member of the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Center for Public Integrity, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. She is also a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire since April 2015 she has served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for freedom of expression and journalist safety.
Amanpour is married to American James Rubin, a former US Assistant Secretary of State and spokesman for the US State Department during the Clinton administration and currently an informal adviser to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President of the United States Barack Obama. Their son, Darius John Rubin, was born in 2000. Having previously lived in London, they moved back to New York City in 2010, where they rented an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But in May 2013, Rubin announced that the family would return to London to work on several projects, and in October of the same year, Amanpour stated that she and her husband would be relocating to London permanently: “Right now I’d have to say that London is my home… My family are in England, and my husband and I are loving reacquainting ourselves with all the friends we left behind”.
Amanpour shared a house on the East Side of Providence with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and some of his friends while he was attending Brown University and she was attending the University of Rhode Island.
Amanpour is the niece (by marriage) of General Nader Jahanbani, who commanded the Imperial Iranian Air Force for nearly 20 years until he was executed by Islamic Revolutionaries in 1979, and of his younger brother Khosrow, who was married to Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi.
Amanpour’s uncle, Captain Nasrollah Amanpour, was married to the younger sister of Khosrow and Nader.
Amanpour appeared in Gilmore Girls as herself in the show’s series finale, “Bon Voyage.” Throughout the series, Amanpour was an inspiration to one of the main characters, aspiring journalist Rory Gilmore. In July 2009 she appeared in a Harper’s Bazaar magazine article entitled “Christiane Amanpour Gets a High-Fashion Makeover”.
Amanpour played herself in newscasts in the films Iron Man 2 and Pink Panther 2. In Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, she voiced Enheduanna in the episode “The Immortals”.
In 2014, Amanpour narrated “Women in War”, an episode of season 2 of Makers: Women Who Make America.
Amanpour’s net worth is estimated US $12.5 million (net worth estimated in 2017).
