Alistair Cooke

Alistair Cooke was born in Lancashire, England in 1908. He attended Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale Universities on scholarships. Cooke started working in media as a BBC film critic and as a London correspondent for NBC. In 1937, Cooke moved to the United States. Beginning in 1946, Cooke hosted the long-running 15-minute weekly radio series Letter from America. He was best known in the U.S. as the host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater from 1971 to 1992. In the 1970s, Cooke was awarded an honorary British knighthood for his contribution to Anglo-American understanding. After his death at in 2004, the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism was established in his honor.