Anderson Cooper, born in Manhattan on 3 June 1967, has anchored CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° since 2001 and was a 60 Minutes correspondent for two decades. He has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards.
Anderson Hays Cooper was born on 3 June 1967 in Manhattan, the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist Gloria Vanderbilt. He is a member of the Vanderbilt family: his maternal grandfather, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was a millionaire equestrian, and Reginald’s great-grandfather was the business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. He has two older half-brothers from his mother’s earlier marriage to conductor Leopold Stokowski. He grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in Southampton, New York.
His media experience began early. As a baby he was photographed by Diane Arbus for Harper’s Bazaar, at three he appeared with his mother on The Tonight Show, and at nine he appeared on To Tell the Truth as an impostor. From age 10 to 13 he modelled for Ford Models for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Macy’s. His father died in January 1978 when he was ten, and he has said that experiences of loss prompted his interest in survival and in journalism.
He attended the Dalton School and, at 17, after graduating a semester early, travelled around Africa for several months on a “survival trip”, contracting malaria and being hospitalised in Kenya. At Yale he majored in political science, was a coxswain on the lightweight rowing team, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989. He spent two summers as an intern at the CIA while studying, and pursued journalism with no formal training, calling himself a “news junkie since [he] was in utero”.
After failing to get an entry-level job at ABC, he took a job as a fact checker at the youth news agency Channel One and, with a forged press pass, entered Myanmar on his own to meet students fighting the government. He then lived in Vietnam for a year to study the language at the University of Hanoi and filmed stories there, and in 1992 filmed reports from Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. ABC News hired him as a correspondent in 1995, and he also worked there as a co-anchor, a game-show host and a fill-in morning talk show host.
In 2001 he joined CNN, where he was given his own show, Anderson Cooper 360°, and has hosted it since. His on-the-ground coverage of Hurricane Katrina sharply increased his popularity, and for his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake he received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honour granted by the Haitian government. From September 2011 to May 2013 he also hosted a syndicated daytime talk show, Anderson Live.
He won an Edward Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2011. He came out as gay in 2012, becoming the most prominent gay journalist on American television, and in 2016 he became the first LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate. He has received several GLAAD Media Awards.
Image: Anderson Cooper speaking at a podium in 2018 (file photo). Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
