Christina Hambley Brown, or Tina Brown, (born November 21, 1953 in Maidenhead, England) is a British-born American magazine editor, columnist, and talk-show host. As the editor of The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, she helped reverse that venerable magazine's fortunes.

She and her older brother, Christopher Hambley Brown, grew up in Little Marlow, in Buckinghamshire on the outskirts of London. Her parents, George Hambley Brown and Bettina Iris Mary (Kohr) Brown were prominent figures in the British film industry. George produced the first Agatha Christie films starring Margaret Rutherford as Jane Marple. His other films included The Chiltern Hundreds (1949); Hotel Sahara (1951), starring Yvonne De Carlo; Guns at Batasi (1964), starring Richard Attenborough and Mia Farrow; and Terror Under the House (1971), starring Joan Collins. In 1939 he had been briefly married to actress Maureen O'Hara. It was after that marriage that he met Bettina, who was then Laurence Olivier's press agent. In her later years, Bettina worked as a gossip columnist for an English-language magazine for expatriates in Spain, where she and George lived in retirement.

Tina was educated at St Anne's College, Oxford. Before graduating in 1974 she won the Sunday Times Drama Award, 1973, for her one-act play Under the Bamboo Tree. A subsequent play, Happy Yellow, was mounted at a small theatre in London in 1977. She also wrote for Isis, the university literary magazine, to which she contributed interviews with the columnist Auberon Waugh and the actor Dudley Moore. She ended up dating both men. Her relationship with Waugh served as a great boost to her writing career, as he used his influence to get her published. At this time in the mid '70s she also dated the writer Martin Amis. In 1973 the Sunday Times called her the Most Promising Female Journalist, and in March of 1974, the British edition of Cosmopolitan magazine described her as a "stunning twenty-year-old playwright" (her photo was shown next to that of a young Arianna Huffington, who was then a Cambridge graduate known as Arianna Stassinopoulos. Both women would become lifelong friends.)

She met Harold Evans in 1974, and began working for him as a writer. They moved in with each other in 1978, shortly after his divorce from Enid Evans, a school-teacher and magistrate. They were married in Southampton, New York on August 20, 1981.

She became editor of the Tattler in June 1979 at the invitation of its new owner, the Australian millionaire Gary Bogard . Brown quadrupled the Tatler's circulation to 40,000. In 1982 S. I. ("Si") Newhouse Jr., owner of Condé Nast Publications, bought the magazine, and in 1983 it was voted England's Magazine of the Year.

She resigned from Tattler, and in May 1983 was hired as an editorial adviser to Vanity Fair for six weeks. She then stayed on as a contributing editor for a brief time, and then was named editor in chief on January 1, 1984. Her restructuring of the magazine made its debut with the April 1984 issue, which featured actress Daryl Hannah on the cover. The magazine's readership began to grow in 1985, and the magazine eventually became a tremendous success.

In January 1986 she gave birth to a son, George Frederick Evans, and in October 1990 to a daughter, Isabel Harriet Evans. In 1992, she resigned Vanity Fair to become editor of The New Yorker and later the short-lived Talk.

Currently, she hosts the talk show Topic [A] With Tina Brown and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.

Bibliography

• Life as a Party (1984) ISBN 0233976000
• Loose Talk (1979) ISBN 0718118332

Biography

• Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power (2001) ISBN 0684837633

External link

• Tina Brown's columns in The Washington Post
• Topic {A} with Tina Brown official CNBC site