Anne Sinclair

Anne Sinclair (born Anne-Élise Schwartz 15 July 1948) is a US-born French television and radio interviewer who hosted one of the most popular political shows for more than thirteen years on TF1, the largest European private TV channel. She also covered the 2008 US presidential campaign for the leading French Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche and the French TV channel Canal+.

Personal life

Anne Sinclair has lived in Washington DC with her second husband, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, since November 2007. She was previously married to Hungarian-French journalist Ivan Levaï with whom she has two sons.

She travels with Strauss-Kahn occasionally as a "G20 spouse", including being invited by Elizabeth II for the G20 reception at Buckingham Palace and by Sarah Brown to 10 Downing Street for the official spouses dinner on 1 April 2009.

Early life and Education

Sinclair was born in New York to Joseph-Robert Schwartz (changed to Sinclair in 1949) and Micheline Nanette Rosenberg, French-Jewish parents who fled from Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II. She is the granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, one of France's biggest art dealers. After completing part of her secondary schooling in the US, she went on to finish in France. She then majored in politics at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and in law at the University of Paris.

Career

Sinclair's first radio hosting job was at Europe 1, one of the leading nationwide radio networks.

Television

Between 1984 and 1997 she hosted 7/7, a weekly Sunday evening news and political show on TF1 that had one of the largest audiences in France. She became one of the most well known French journalists and conducted more than five hundred interviews over the course of the show's thirteen year run. Anne Sinclair's programme has often been compared to Larry King Live or Charlie Rose.

Every Sunday at 7 PM Anne Sinclair hosted a one hour interview with a leading French or international personality. She interviewed French presidents Francois Mitterrand and Nicolas Sarkozy as well as US president Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, Felipe Gonzales, German chancellors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder, Hillary Clinton, the UN Secretary General in New York during the first gulf war, and Prince Charles.

Although primarily focused on politics, her show also included celebrities such as Madonna, Sharon Stone, Paul McCartney, Woody Allen, and George Soros. She conducted interviews with French cultural figures such as Johnny Hallyday, Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, Bernard-Henri Levy, and Elie Wiesel.

Sinclair won four Sept d'Or, the French equivalent of the Emmy Awards.

After 7/7

In 1997 she chose to leave the show to avoid conflict of interest when her husband Dominique Strauss-Kahn became French finance minister. She then created an Internet subsidiary company for her former employer TF1 and ran it for four years before returning to journalism. In 2003 she launched a cultural radio programme called Libre Cours (Free Rein) on France Inter, the French equivalent of NPR.

She also wrote bestsellers on politics: Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'eux (Grasset, 1997) and Caméra Subjective (Grasset, 2003).

In October 2008 she launched her blog Two or three things from America which comments daily on US and international political news. It has become one of the top twelve political French blogs. She is also working on her latest book about US political life.