|
|
|
|
| Birth Name(s) : Anderson Hays Cooper |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
|
Partner:
|
| Profession:
Public Figure |
| << Add Anderson Cooper To Your Favorites |
|
Full Anderson Cooper Biography
Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an Emmy Award winning American journalist, author, and television personality. He currently works as the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is normally broadcast live from a New York City based studio; however, Cooper often broadcasts live, on location for breaking news stories.
Anderson Cooper was born on June 3, 1967 in New York City, as the younger son of the writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and the artist, designer, writer, and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. He is of mostly English, Irish, Dutch and Spanish ancestry.
Cooper's father suffered a series of heart attacks, and died January 5, 1978 while undergoing open-heart surgery at the age of 50. This is said to have affected the young Cooper "enormously." In retrospect, he has said, "I think I’m a lot like my father in several ways," including "that we look a lot alike and that we have a similar sense of humor and a love of storytelling." Cooper considers his father's book Families as "sort of a guide on...how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him."
Cooper's older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of Vanderbilt's New York City penthouse apartment. Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expresses her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug Proventil. Carter's suicide is apparently what sparked Anderson to become a journalist:
"Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it’s something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can’t tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?"
Cooper also has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus Stokowski (born 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (born 1952), from Gloria Vanderbilt's ten-year marriage to the conductor Leopold Stokowski.
Cooper has never married, and has actively avoided discussing his relationships or even his sexual orientation, citing a desire to protect his neutrality as a journalist:
He also said to Oprah Winfrey while promoting his book that he had suffered from dyslexia as a child. He confirmed his "mild dyslexia" on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, who is also dyslexic, on August 1, 2007.
Cooper graduated from The Dalton School in 1984. He continued his education at Yale University, where he resided in Trumbull College and studied both Political Science and International Relations and graduated in 1989.
During college, he spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency. Although he technically has no formal journalistic education, he opted to pursue a career in journalism rather than stay with the agency after school, having been a "news junkie" "since I was in utero".
After reporting from Burma, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year and then returned to filming stories from a variety of war-torn regions around the globe, including Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Haunted by his brother's suicide, Anderson explains, "The only thing I really knew is that I was hurting and needed to go someplace where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside." Cooper describes himself as having become "fascinated with conflict" during this dangerous period of his life.
On assignment for several years, Cooper had slowly become desensitized to the violence he was witnessing around him; the horrors of the Rwandan Genocide became trivial: "I would see a dozen bodies and think, you know, It's a dozen, it's not so bad". One particular incident however snapped him out of it:
In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor of World News Now on September 21, 1999. In 2000 he switched career paths, taking a job as the host of ABC's reality show The Mole:
Cooper also was a fill in co-host for Regis Philbin for the TV talk show Live with Regis and Kelly in 2007 when Philbin underwent triple bypass heart surgery. He recapped the show for viewers of Anderson Cooper 360, often poking fun at the way he laughed.
In January 2005 he was sent to Sri Lanka to cover the tsunami damage. That same month, he also went to Baghdad, Iraq to cover the elections. In February and March 2005, he covered the Cedar Revolution in Beirut, Lebanon. In early April 2005 he reported from Rome, covering the death of Pope John Paul II, and from London, covering the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
His first major interview was on April 22, 2007 where he interviewed rapper Cam'ron about the "Stop Snitching" campaign. During the interview, Cooper asked Cam'ron whether he would tell the police if he lived next to a serial killer and knew that person was killing people. Cam'ron replied, "No, I wouldn't call and tell on them but I'd probably move." Cam'ron later apologized for his comments. |
|
|
| Add Anderson Cooper Biography (SuperUSERS) + |
| Add Anderson Cooper Review/Comment
|
HQ Anderson Cooper Pictures (18) | Random Anderson Cooper Picture
|
| << Back to the Anderson Cooper Homepage |
|
