Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington, née Stassinopoulos, was born in Greece and moved to the UK for her higher education. She read economics at Cambridge University, where she became the first foreign-born, and only the third female, president of the debating society, the Cambridge Union. After graduation, she began writing books and articles for journals and magazines with the assistance of Bernard Levin, her mentor and lover. In the 1980s, she became famous for her two biographies, Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend (1981), and Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1989). In 1985, she married multimillionaire Michael Huffington, with whom she had two daughters before they divorced in 1997. She supported him in his career as a Republican congressman from California and bid for a Senate seat. She was a conservative political and cultural commentator during the marriage, but later re-adopted her formerly held left-wing beliefs. In 2005, she founded The Huffington Post, a news and blog site, which quickly became one of the most popular and frequently-cited sources in the media. She is a nationally syndicated columnist and chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group. She's the author of 14 books to date.