Anne Sinclair

Anne Sinclair (born Anne-Élise Schwartz; 15 July 1948) is a French-American television and radio interviewer. She hosted one of the most popular political shows for more than thirteen years on TF1, the largest European private TV channel. She is heiress to much of the fortune of her maternal grandfather, art dealer Paul Rosenberg. She covered the 2008 US presidential campaign for the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche and the French TV channel Canal+. She married French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 1991 and divorced him in 2013 in the aftermath of the New York v. Strauss-Kahn case. She was portrayed in the 2014 feature film Welcome to New York.

Anne-Elise Schwartz was born 15 July 1948 in New York City to Joseph-Robert Schwartz (changed to Sinclair in 1949) and Micheline Nanette Rosenberg. Via her mother she is the maternal granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, one of France’s and later New York’s biggest art dealers. Both of her parents were French-born Jews who had married pre-war, and who with Paul Rosenberg and his wife had fled from the Nazi persecution of Jews after the 1940 Nazi invasion of France.

A few years after her birth, the family returned to France. She attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school. She majored in politics at Sciences Po and in law at the University of Paris.

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

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 country’s best known journalists and conducted more than five hundred interviews over the course of the show’s thirteen-year run.

Every Sunday at 7 pm Sinclair hosted a one-hour interview with a leading French or international personality. She interviewed French presidents François Mitterrand and Nicolas Sarkozy as well as US president Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Shimon Peres, Felipe González, German chancellors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder, King Hassan II of Morocco, 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 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 Lévy, and Elie Wiesel.

Sinclair won three Sept d’Ors, the French equivalent of the Emmy Awards.

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). …

Source: Article “Anne Sinclair” from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.