Kathie Lee Gifford (born
Kathryn Lee Epstein on August 16, 1953) is an American television host, singer, songwriter and actress, best known for her 15-year run (1985–2000) on the talk show
Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee, which she co-hosted with Regis Philbin. She has received 11 Daytime Emmy nominations and won her first Daytime Emmy in 2010 as part of
The Today Show team.
Before her long stint in talk shows, Gifford's first television exposure was that of Tom Kennedy's singer/sidekick on
Name That Tune, from 1974-78.
She also appeared in television advertisements for Carnival Cruise Lines beginning in 1984.
On April 7, 2008, Gifford began co-hosting the fourth hour of NBC's
Today, alongside Hoda Kotb.
Early life
Gifford was born
Kathryn Lee Epstein in Paris, France to Joan (née Cuttell; born January 20, 1930), a singer, and Aaron Epstein (March 19, 1924 – November 19, 2002), a musician and former U.S. Navy officer. Aaron Epstein was stationed with his family in France at the time of Gifford's birth.
Gifford grew up in Bowie, Maryland, and attended Bowie High School.
During high school, Gifford was a singer in a folk group, "Pennsylvania Next Right," which performed frequently at school assemblies. During her senior year at high school she dated and went to the prom with Michael Bray (who later became an anti-abortion activist convicted for acts of terrorism).
[Juergensmeyer, M., "Soldiers for Christ", Terror in the Mind of God, p. 22] After high school graduation, Gifford attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, studying drama and music.
Gifford's paternal grandfather was Russian Jewish from Saint-Petersburg and her paternal grandmother was of Native American ancestry. Her mother, a relative of writer Rudyard Kipling, was of French Canadian, English and German descent and was raised in a snake handler family.
After seeing the Billy Graham-produced film,
The Restless Ones at age 12, Gifford became a born-again Christian. She told interviewer Larry King, "I was raised with many Jewish traditions and raised to be very grateful for my Jewish heritage."
[ "What's Next for Kathie Lee?", Transcripts.cnn.com] Her brother, Rev. David Paul Epstein, is an evangelical Baptist preacher and pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York City.
1970s
Gifford represented Maryland in America's Junior Miss Pageant in 1970.
[ Kathie Lee Gifford profile at Yahoo! Movies]During one summer in the early 1970s, she was a live-in secretary/babysitter for Anita Bryant at her home in Miami. Gifford's career took off in the 1970s (during her first marriage to Christian composer/arranger/producer/publisher Paul Johnson) as a vocalist on the game show
Name That Tune with Tom Kennedy (she performed the "sing a tune" segment as Kathie Lee Johnson). In 1978, she joined the cast of the short-lived
Hee Haw spinoff,
Hee Haw Honeys.
Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee
Following her divorce from Johnson in 1983, Gifford met sports commentator Frank Gifford (born August 16, 1930) during an episode of ABC's
Good Morning America; the couple married in 1986. By that time she was several months into her most famous television role, as a full-time morning talk show personality. On June 24, 1985, she replaced Ann Abernathy as co-host of
The Morning Show on WABC-TV with Regis Philbin. The program went into national broadcast in 1988 as
Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee, and Gifford became well-known across the country. Throughout the 1990s, millions of morning-TV viewers watched her descriptions of life at home with her sportscaster husband and their two children. She appeared as a spokesperson for Slim Fast diet shakes after her son, Cody, was born. She also was the face of Carnival Cruises in the late 1980s and early 1990s, singing "If my friends could see me now!"
1996 labor rights efforts
In 1996 the National Labor Committee, a human rights group, reported that sweatshop labor was being used to make clothes for the Kathie Lee line, sold at Wal-Mart.
[ "The Man Who Made Kathie Lee Cry", Washington Post, July 31, 2005] The group reported that a worker in Honduras smuggled a piece of clothing out of the factory, which had a Kathie Lee label on it.
[ "Zoned for Slavery: The Child Behind the Label", 1995; a Crowning Rooster Production] One of the workers, Wendy Diaz, came to the United States to testify about the conditions under which she worked. She commented, "I wish I could talk to
Lee. If she's good, she will help us."
Labor activist, Charles Kernaghan, spoke to the media and accused Gifford of being responsible for the sweatshop management activity. Gifford addressed Kernaghan's allegations on the air during
Live, explaining that she was not involved with hands-on project management in factories.
[ Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing line and its connection to sweatshop work]Gifford later contacted Federal authorities to investigate the issue and worked with U.S. Federal legislative and executive branch agencies to support and enact laws to protect children against sweatshop conditions. She appeared with President Bill Clinton at the White House in support of the government's initiatives to counter international sweatshop abuses.
["Companies agree to meet on 'sweatshops'. The Washington Post, John F. Harris, Peter McKay. August 3, 1996, Page A10. "Pres Clinton stood side-by-side at the White House Aug 2, 1996 with talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford and a delegation of leading executives from the apparel industry to announce ..." ]Current career
Since
Live, Gifford has made guest appearances in films and television series, and has several independently released albums on CD, including 2000's
The Heart of a Woman, featuring the single "Love Never Fails".
[Love Never Fails video on YouTube][ Amazon.com website]In September 2005 she became a special correspondent on
The Insider, a syndicated entertainment magazine television show, ending her relationship with that program upon her co-hosting role with
Today.
[ "Kathie Lee Gifford lands role on The Insider"]She played the role of Miss Hannigan in a concert performance of
Annie at Madison Square Garden in December 2006.
[ "Kathie Lee Gifford plays Miss Hannigan in MSG production of Annie"]On March 31, 2008, NBC announced that Gifford was to join its morning show,
Today, as co-host of the fourth hour, alongside Hoda Kotb. This marked her return to morning television; in many markets, she now airs directly after her old show, now called
Live! with Kelly and Michael. Because the fourth hour of
Today airs live at 10:00am ET, and
Live! with Kelly and Michael airs live at 9:00am ET, Gifford's hour does not compete directly with her former show in most markets.
Kotb and Gifford replaced Ann Curry and Natalie Morales. The show's ratings decreased after Gifford's arrival, having drawn 1.9 million viewers the weeks before her arrival and 1.7 million a few months after, although the network maintains that the drop in viewers was seasonal and unrelated to the on-air talent.
[ "Forthright or Clueless? Kathie Lee Draws Fire"] More recently, the 4th hour of
Today has averaged 2.148 million total viewers, an increase of 26 percent over those 2008 numbers.
[ "TODAY is the No. 1 Morning Program for 797 Weeks Straight and Counting"]She is a recipient of the Mousecar Award (as in "Oscar"), a silver Mickey Mouse statue award that was personally designed by Walt Disney himself. The award was presented personally by Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, who said that only five had been given out previously.
On March 27, 2010, she guest starred on
The Suite Life on Deck, along with her real-life daughter, Cassidy.
Gifford is a celebrity ambassador for the non-profit organization Childhelp. She regularly makes appearances at fund raisers and events for the child abuse prevention and treatment organization and is an ardent supporter.
[ "Childhelp goes Hollywood for fundraiser"]Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford raised the money to build and continue to financially support two shelters in New York City for babies born with HIV or a congenital crack cocaine addiction. These shelters were named in honor of her children, Cody and Cassidy.
On July 1, 2008, Gifford appeared on NBC's
Celebrity Family Feud. She and her friends and family competed against the cast of
Dog The Bounty Hunter for their favorite charity. Gifford's family won the $50,000 for The Association to Benefit Children.
Discography
{| class="wikitable"|-! Title! Release! Record label|-|
Sentimental (#108 Billboard Hot 200)| 1993|Warner Bros. Records|-|
It?s Christmas Time| 1993|Warner Bros. Records|-|
Dreamship: Lullabies for Little Ones (#24
Billboard Kids Albums chart)| 1996|Warner Bros. Records|-|
Heart of a Woman| 2000|Umvd Labels|-|
Born For You| 2000|Valley Entertainment
[ ]|-|
Goodnight, Angel| 2001|On the Lamb|-|
Party Animals| 2001|On the Lamb|-|
Gentle Grace| 2004|Maranatha|-|
My Way Home| 2009|LML Music|}
Musical theatre
In the late 1990s, Gifford began working in musical theatre. She contributed a number of musical numbers to
Hats, and wrote and produced
Under The Bridge,
based upon the children's book
The Family Under The Bridge by Natalie Savage Carlson.
In 2007, she premiered
Saving Aimee, a stage musical about evangelist Aimee McPherson, at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.
The premiere starred actress Carolee Carmello in the lead role.
[ "Carmello Is Famed Evangelist in Kathie Lee Gifford's Saving Aimee Musical"] The show, now titled
The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson, ran on Broadway from November 15, 2012 through December 09, 2012
[http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=493183], with Carmello reprising her role as McPherson. On April 30, 2013, Carmello received her third Tony Award nomination for the performance.
[Tony Awards Official Website. Tony Award Nominees 2013. tonyAwards.org. Retrieved May 1, 2013.]On April 16, 2007, Gifford was a guest presenter at the Washington, DC Helen Hayes Award Ceremony, honoring contributions and professional accomplishments in theatre.
[ Celebrating the Stars at the Helen Hayes Awards]In 2008, Gifford and David Friedman wrote a junior high school musical entitled
Key Pin It Real.
The play depicts a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Key Pin. The first production took place in December 2008 in Kendallville, Indiana at East Noble High School.
[ www.tradingmarkets.com]Gifford is currently working on a musical adaptation of
It's a Wonderful Life with John McDaniel; McDaniel is composing music while Gifford is writing lyrics.
References
External links
{{Persondata|NAME= Gifford, Kathie Lee|ALTERNATIVE NAMES= Epstein, Kathryn Lee|SHORT DESCRIPTION= Television presenter/talk show host/actress/singer-songwriter|DATE OF BIRTH= |PLACE OF BIRTH= Paris, France|DATE OF DEATH=|PLACE OF DEATH=}}
1953 birthsActors from MarylandAmerican evangelicalsAmerican female singersAmerican performers of Christian musicAmerican television actorsAmerican television reporters and correspondentsAmerican television talk show hostsAmerican women journalistsChristian religion-related songwritersChristians of Jewish descentConverts to ChristianityLiving peopleMilitary bratsMusicians from MarylandNBC NewsAmerican_people_of_Russian-Jewish_descentAmerican people of Native American descentAmerican people of English descentAmerican people of German descentAmerican people of French-Canadian descentOral Roberts University alumniPeople from Bowie, Maryland
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