Julie Chen Moonves has been watching over the hosting duties of Big Brother for a long time. From Julie's first season in July 2000 to the latest all-stars season of 2020, Big Brother has always stayed CBS’s top-rated summer series. As the show moves into its third week, the excitement grows 22-fold. But first, here’s all that there is to know about the real star of Big Brother, Julie Chen Moonves herself!
With the completely renewed and COVID-19 preventive house design, returning houseguests, and lack of showmances (so far), season 22 is touted to be the best season yet. Big Brother’s return for 2020 was a big question mark as the number of positive coronavirus cases in America kept rising. But with a “safety first” motto, reality TV legends from season 6 to 21 showed up during the Big Brother premiere. Fifty-year-old Chen Moonves, who embraced the notorious nickname of “Chenbot,” returned to the stage and even delivered a new sign-off quote every week. Never one to steal the spotlight from the Big Brother contestants, Chen Moonves has consistently aced her hosting game despite crazy contestants, shocking controversies, and the ever-increasing prize amount. Twenty years and 22 seasons strong, there’s a reason why Chen Moonves is the longest-serving host of any country's version of the show.
The reality TV veteran Chen Moonves hails from Queens, New York City but was born to Chinese immigrants as the youngest of three girls. Fluent in both English and Mandarin, Chen Moonves once revealed how her grandfather, who was a polygamist with nine wives, earned his way up the economic ladder with a chain of grocery stores. The Big Brother host’s grandmother was his first wife. A self-professed “geek,” Chen Moonves attended the University of Southern California and graduated in 1991 with a major in English and Broadcast Journalism. The List notes how her strict parents inspired her career when her father made her watch broadcaster Kaity Tong on ABC’s 5 o’clock news. Chen Moonves’ career in the news world actually came even before her graduation, when she interned at CBS Morning News in 1990 answering calls and copying faxes. A decade later, Chen Moonves ended up becoming an anchor and producer of the same show. The television personality revealed to Us Weekly how a news director asked her to get plastic surgery to make “her Asian eyes look bigger” as an anchor, which she did at 25.
Chen Moonves has spoken about facing challenges with lower-pay due to her ethnicity. However, she soon found success on TV screens. The Big Brother host became a reporter at WDTN-TV from 1995 to 1997, a reporter and anchor at WCBS-TV, and then a news anchor for the CBS Morning News and This Morning from 1999 to 2002. She served as a co-host, and later as a contributing anchor of The Early Show from 2002- 2010. In the midst of it all, Big Brother happened to Chen Moonves in 2000, and the rest, as they say, is history. On the personal front, Chen Moonves met her fiancé and news editor Gary Donahue in 1991 while working a news assistant for ABC News in Los Angeles. But the relationship ended around the time Chen Moonves met future husband, President and Chief Executive Officer of CBS, Les Moonves, while he was still married. Moonves’ divorce took two years to finalize and Chen Moonves married him within two weeks in December 2004. In September 2009, the power couple gave birth to their son, Charlie.
In December 2018, CBS fired Les Moonves as CEO after a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct. Subsequently, Chen Moonves officially left her role as one of The Talk’s co-hosts. However, she decided to continue her journey as the Big Brother host while standing by her husband. In a September 2018 episode for season 20, she signed off for the night by saying, “From outside the Big Brother house, I'm Julie Chen Moonves. Good night,” marking the first time she used her married name onscreen. Chen Moonves continues to host Big Brother and has no plans of leaving the show in the hands of another television personality.
Big Brother 22: All-Stars airs Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays at 8 pm EST on CBS.
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