Elaine "Lainey" Lui is a Canadian television personality, reporter, and infotainer.
Background
Lui was born and raised in Toronto. Eventually, her father found stable work as an accountants When Lui was 6, her parents divorced and her mother returned to Hong Kong.
Lui spent many summers in Hong Kong to visit her mother.
Education
Lui attended middle school and high school at the Toronto French School and graduated from Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute. In 1996, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in French and history from the University of Western Ontario.
Career
She is a self-proclaimed gossip maven. She pens a website, laineygossip.com, is a reporter for CTV"s etalk, and is also a co-host on CTV"s daily talk series The Social. Her parents, Judy and Bernard, immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in 1970.
They worked odd jobs, including washing dishes and cleaning hotel rooms.
After graduating from Western, she worked for Rogers Communications and trained employees to install Internet connections. Lui worked in not-for-profit fundraising.
She was living in Vancouver and working for the University of British Columbia when she returned to Toronto to care for her mother, who needed a kidney transplant. She then took a job with Covenant House, which offers shelter and services for the homeless.
The roots of LaineyGossip.com are in an email that Lui sent to two friends to keep them up to date on celebrity gossip.
That subscriber list quickly grew and she started her blog. She left Covenant House in 2006 to commit herself full-time to her blog. etalk, CTV"s Canadian entertainment newsmagazine, hired Lui in 2006 as a celebrity gossip source. Since joining etalk in 2006, Lui has covered the Oscars, the Super Bowl, the JUNO Awards, Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the MuchMusic Video Awards (MMVAs).
The Social premiered on September 2, 2013 with Lui as co-host alongside Melissa Grelo, Cynthia Loyst and Traci Melchor.
The show airs daily at 1 p.m. on CTV. Lui participated in the 2015 edition of Canada Reads, where she advocated for Raziel Reid"s novel When Everything Feels Like the Movies. Hosting the Smut Soiree During the summer, Lui would always be seen hosting the Smut Soiree in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Smut Soiree is an annual gossip show event which Lui, along with her co-host Dan Levy, talks about the latest gossip in popular culture and what"s happening in Hollywood. She and Levy have been hosting the event ever since either 2008 or 2009.