Andrea Thompson

Andrea Thompson is a model-turned-actress-turned-TV journalist. She began her modelling career as a teen, and later studied acting at New York's prestigious Actors Studio. She landed a role in the sci-fi series Babylon V (1994-95, as telepath Talia Winters) and then co-starred on the cop show NYPD Blue, where she played detective Jill Kirkendall from 1996-99. In early 2000 she surprised her fans by moving to New Mexico and taking a job as news anchorwoman on a local station. In 2001 Thompson joined cable network CNN as an anchor of its Headline News programming. The hiring led to some criticism of CNN after it became known that Thompson had almost no journalism experience, was a high school dropout (she has the equivalent of a diploma) and had once posed nude for magazine photographs (the photos were for Black & White, what Thompson described as "a prestigious artistic pulbication"). In March of 2002 Thompson quit CNN unexpectedly, saying it was time "to make a change in my daily professional life." She has since done both journalism and acting, appearing in 2003 in 24 (starring Kiefer Sutherland), hosting shows on Court TV (Psychic Detectives) and penning stories for Fox News.

Extra credit: Thompson's fellow alumni at the Actors Studio include Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro and Sally Field... Other TV news personalities on Who2 include Paula Zahn, Peter Jennings and Katie Couric... Some sources list her birth year as 1960, but her "official" site says 1959.