Anne Josephine Robinson (born 26 September 1944) is an English television presenter and television game show hostess who is most famous for hosting the BBC game show, The Weakest Link, which has earned her the nickname "Queen of Mean". She was also one of the presenters on the long-running British consumer affairs series, Watchdog, from 1993 to 2001.
Born Anne Josephine Robinson in the town of Crosby in Liverpool, England on the 26th of September 1944, this famous host of the hit BBC and NBC quiz show the "Weakest Link, The" (2001/II) started her career as a journalist for Rediffusion. She made her way up by working on the Daily Mail, Sunday Times and Daily Mirror. It was at the Mirror where she was to make her mark, being Assistant Editor throughout the 1980s and early 1990s; she was the first woman to regularly edit a national newspaper. She credits that most of her formative education was gleaned not from attending the convent boarding school or university, but from working on her mother's "marled" stall. She is one of the UK's most distinguished broadcasters and journalists and was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool's John Moores University in 1996. She is well-known (even in America) for her red hair, her dark Giorgio Armani suits, her impatience with organizations that give customers a raw deal (she was the host of the prime time BBC 1 consumer affairs show "Watchdog" (1985)) and, of course, her wink (which was developed when, in 1987, the director of right-to-reply show "Points of View" (1961) asked her not to wink - she subsequently winked at the end of every program.) She is married to journalist John Penrose, who also acts as her personal manager (and whom she both divorced and remarried in 1994). Her daughter Emma, from her first husband, Charlie Wilson, is a graduate of the prestigious New York University and works as a freelance television director, writer and presenter in London and New York. Anne Robinson divides her time between her house in Kensington and her home in the Cotswolds, where she enjoys walking her English Setters: Maudie and Sebastian.
