Background

Andy Cohen was born on June 2, 1968, in St. Louis, Missouri, the United States, to Evelyn and Lou Cohen. He also has a sister, Emily Rosenfeld.

Education

Andy Cohen studied at the Clayton High School and completed his graduation in 1986. In interviews and in his 2012 memoir Most Talkative, he says he grew up with a keen interest in TV and celebrities. One show, in particular, comes up often in stories about Cohen’s early life - the soap All My Children, which he watched religiously in Clayton.

His love of the soap led him to his first celebrity interview subject - Susan Lucci - whom he persuaded to agree to an interview with him in New York in December 1987 while he was a journalism student at Boston University. While there, he also wrote for the independent student newspaper of the university, The Daily Free Press. Cohen graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science degree in broadcast journalism.

Career

Andy Cohen held internships at St. Louis radio and TV stations in high school, and after his graduation from college in 1990, he landed a job in New York as a news clerk at CBS News assigned to the network’s morning show CBS This Morning.

In 2000, he began working with the network Trio, and following its takeover by Bravo, Cohen was made their vice president of original programming in 2004. His responsibilities as the executive vice president of development and talent of Bravo till 2013 included developing original content and formats, apart from identifying new talent.

He worked as an executive producer for the Peabody Award’-winning Trio documentary The N-Word (2004), the Bravo reality TV series Project Runway (2007), and the Emmy-winning Bravo reality competition series Top Chef (2010). He continues his association with the Real Housewives franchise as an executive producer.

He worked as a host for the American pop culture-based late-night talk show Watch What Happens Live, which premiered on Bravo on July 16, 2009. He also contributes as an executive producer of the show. He appeared in the NBC morning talk show Today (2010-2019) and co-hosted the syndicated morning talk show Live! with Kelly (2011-2019) and the ABC talk show The View (2012-2018).

Over the years, he has appeared in single episodes of several TV programs, such as The Comeback (2014) and Inside Amy Schumer (2016). He also appeared as a shoe salesman in an episode of the popular romantic comedy-drama series Sex and the City (2004), titled Let There Be Light.

Andy Cohen has also hosted various beauty pageants, such as the Miss USA pageant in 2011, 2012, and 2013 and the Miss Universe pageant in 2011 and 2012. Cohen, who is quite candid about being gay, mentioned on August 15, 2013, that he would not co-host the Miss Universe pageant that was to be held in Russia that year, as the country had then recently adopted anti-gay laws.

Most Talkative, the autobiographical memoir of Cohen, which was published on May 8, 2012, by Henry Holt and Company, became a New York Times Best Seller. He came up with his second memoir, The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year, on November 11, 2014. It emerged as a Times Best Seller in the Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction category.

An announcement by Henry Holt and Company in 2016 informed that they were launching the imprint Andy Cohen Books. Cohen’s third book, Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries, a sequel of his second book, was published on November 15 that year. It was another Times Best Seller.

Cohen is most closely associated with the Real Housewives shows on Bravo. He is the host of the reunion shows that air at the conclusion of each Real Housewives season in which he is seen interviewing the participants and getting them to recount some of the memorable moments of conflict seen in the season’s episodes.

Cohen helped develop the Real Housewives franchise, starting with The Real Housewives of Orange County in 2006, when he was a programming and development executive at Bravo.

In his 10 years in program development at Bravo, Cohen helped shepherd the reality shows that would define the network - from the Real Housewives franchise to a slew of others, including Project Runway, Top Chef, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, The Millionaire Matchmaker, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D List and many others. In November 2017, Cohen’s contract with NBC Universal was renewed through 2020.

Achievements

• 

  Andy Cohen is unique in that he's one of the only executives in TV history to have parlayed a career in program management and production into a career as a TV star.
  
  He was included on the list of the 25 Best Dressed Men of the Year of GQ and was selected as one of the Digital All-Stars of Broadcasting & Cable in 2012.
  
  He also found a place on the list of the Most Powerful Gay People of the American LGBT fashion, lifestyle, and entertainment magazine Out, from 2012 to 2016. He won the Vito Russo Award at the 30th GLAAD Media Awards in 2019.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year

    (A New York Times bestseller, The Andy Cohen Diaries chron...)

    2014
  • Superficial: More Adventures from the Andy Cohen Diaries

    (The star-studded and sidesplitting follow up to The Andy ...)

    2018
  • Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture

    (The man behind the Real Housewives writes about his lifel...)

    2012

Views

In 2016, Cohen collaborated with his friend Anderson Cooper and started a national tour, AC2. They toured 20 cities and went on to raise more than $240,000 to benefit the OneOrlando fund, which was set up in the aftermath of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting.

Quotations: "Fame does different things to different people. For some people, it makes them a better person."

Personality

Andy Cohen is a loyal fan of baseball's Cardinals from his St. Louis, Missouri hometown.

Interests

• Reading

• Writers

  Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Christodora by Tim Murphy, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words by Michael Ausiello, October 1964 by David Halberstam

• Artists

  Andy Warhol

• Sport & Clubs

  Baseball, hockey, St. Louis Cardinals, St. Louis Blues

• Athletes

  Lou Brock

• Music & Bands

  Cher, Madonna, Beyoncé

Connections

Cohen is openly gay and does not shy away from revealing his sexual orientation. Cohen is not married but was in a relationship with Harvard Ph.D. student Clifton Dassuncao until April 2018. Andy Cohen announced he was expecting his first child via surrogate on December 20, 2018, he officially became a single dad to his son Benjamin Allen Cohen on February 4, 2019.

Father:

Lou Cohen

Mother:

Evelyn Cohen

Son:

Benjamin Allen Cohen

ex-boyfriend:

Clifton Dassuncao

Friend:

Sarah Parker

Andy Cohen met Sarah when he was a producer for The Morning Show on CBS. Then he ran into her a year later at a Vanity Fair party and was so happy and shocked when she remembered him. They've been best friends and annual Met Ball dates ever since.

Acquaintance:

Rihanna (Robyn Fenty)

Acquaintance:

Hillary Clinton

References

• Andy Cohen on Instagram