|
Here are the details; sorry, can;t link -- got this off a public library search.
NAME: Christiane Amanpour Birth: January 12, 1958 in London, England Nationality: British Occupation: journalist Source: Newsmakers 1997, Issue 4. Gale Research, 1997. Updated: 05/2000 The oldest of the four daughters of an Iranian-Muslim airline executive and his British-Catholic wife, Amanpour was born in London, England. The family moved to Teheran, Iran when she was eight months old, where they were politically well-connected. While growing up there, Amanpour's family vacationed in Switzerland with the family of Iran's ambassador to the United States. The Amanpours even met up with actor James Mason and his wife on trips to London. Alan Jolis commented in his Vogue profile that Amanpour is a tomboy and hinted that she must have been a brat growing up in Teheran. "Oh, yes," she responded, "I was terrible. When I was five, I clambered onto a table to retrieve a balloon that had gotten stuck on the ceiling and pulled the entire chandelier down." However, she was quick to add that she had what she believes to be the world's best childhood. Amanpour was sent to Holy Cross Convent School in Buckinghamshire, England when she was eleven years old. Although not far from he maternal grandparents' home, she told Jolis that she was miserable. "Bog Irish nuns hit me with rulers. I was so homesick. When it was my turn to wash up all the cutlery after meals, I used to cry and use my homesickness as an excuse to get someone else to wash up for me." At age 16, Amanpour moved on to New Hall, the oldest Catholic girls' school in the United Kingdom. Initially, Amanpour told Vogue, her career goals were set on medicine. "I wanted to be a surgeon," she said. She realized her poor grades would never get her into medical school, so upon graduation at age 18, she went to work in a department store. During this time, one of her sisters had been accepted to a London journalism school, but then changed her mind about attending. "I tried to get her tuition reimbursed," Amanpour told Jolis. "They refused, so I said, 'Can you take me?' That's how I got in--a fluke, really!"
In 1979, the Amanpour family left Iran as a result of the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution. Although the immediate family relocated safely to London, an uncle who had been director of the military police hospital was arrested and died in jail, reported Stephen Kinzer in the New York Times Magazine.
The family's resettlement in London was difficult, Amanpour told Ron Arias in People, and her father lost everything. The Amanpours "had to start over. But I remember I wanted to have a reason to be in the middle of things, with all the movers and shakers. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent." Amanpour had friends in Rhode Island and was lucky enough to have her maternal grandmother foot part of the bill for her tuition to the University of Rhode Island, where she entered at age 22 and majored in journalism. A self-proclaimed perfectionist who hates mediocrity, she earned straight A's except in economics, in which she got a C. "I graduated with a 3.8 average, but I should have had a 4.0," she said in Jolis's Vogue article. She graduated summa cum laude in 1983 with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
While a student at the University of Rhode Island, Amanpour worked part-time in the news departments of WBRU, a local radio station in Providence, and WJAR-TV, an NBC affiliate. After graduating, she stayed on at WJAR and was assigned to the station's investigative reporting team. Jim Taricani, who headed the team, told Kinzer that he knew she would make it in the news business, describing her as "an extraordinary person" who "had a lot of drive."
One of Amanpour's URI professors, Antone Silvia, recalled his student's worry that her "bad dialect" would be a liability in broadcasting. When CNN was starting up in the early eighties, no one believed that 24-hour cable news could ever succeed on a minor level, let alone compete with the major networks. While Silvia himself turned down a job at CNN for just those reasons, Amanpour--accent and all-- was hired on the basis of a telephone interview and packed up for Atlanta in September of 1983. She arrived with little more than a bicycle and a few dollars, but went to work quickly, answering phones, typing scripts, and taking satellite feeds at CNN's foreign desk. A former supervisor of Amanpour's, Eason Jordan, told People that Amanpour immediately let it be known that she "wanted to be a star. We all smiled." CNN's executive vice president of news Ed Turner (no relation to Ted Turner) told a similar story to Stephen Kinzer of New York Times Magazine: "When she first came in here, I remember her telling me not only that she was going to be a correspondent, but that she was going to be a foreign correspondent. I tried to dissuade her and tell her gently that it didn't seem to be in the cards. She just looked at me and ... answer: 'You wait, Ed Turner, you just wait.'"
<snip>
|