Shortly after her birth in London, on January 12, 1958 her British mother Patricia, and her father Mohammed, an Iranian airline executive, moved the family to Tehran. The Amanpours led a privileged life under the regime of the Shah of Iran.^{[citation needed]} At age 11, she returned to England to attend first the Holy Cross Convent School in Buckinghamshire, England, and then the New Hall School, an exclusive Roman Catholic girls' school. Her family had to flee Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Amanpour moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island. During her time at URI she worked in the News Department at WBRU-FM Providence.

After graduation, she worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island as an electronic graphics designer.^[1] In 1983, she was hired by CNN. In 1989, she was posted to Frankfurt, Germany, where she reported on the democratic revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe at the time. However, it was her coverage of the Persian Gulf War that followed Iraq's occupation of Kuwait in 1990 that made her famous. Thereafter, she reported from the Bosnian war and many other conflict zones. Her emotional delivery from Sarajevo during the Siege of Sarajevo led some viewers and critics to question her professional objectivity, to which she replied, "There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing."^[2]

From 1996-2005, she contracted with CBS to file four to five in-depth, international news reports a year as a special contributor on that network's newsmagazine program, 60 Minutes. These reports garnered a Peabody Award in 1998, adding to the Peabody she was awarded in 1993.

In 1993, she was also awarded the George Polk Award for Television Reporting. Again in 1996 she, along with Anita Pratap, received the George Polk Award for Foreign Television Reporting for their story "Battle for Afghanistan," which aired on CNN.

Based out of CNN's London bureau, Amanpour is one of the most recognized international correspondents on American television. Her willingness to work in dangerous conflict zones has reportedly made her one of the more highly (if not the highest) paid field reporters in the world. She speaks English, Persian, and French fluently. Forbes magazine has named her one of the 100 Most Powerful Women.

She has had many memorable moments in her career, one of them being a telephone interview with Yasser Arafat during the siege on his compound in March 2002, during which Chairman Arafat hung up on her.[1] Another was landing the first and only post-election interview of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by a Western journalist in 2005, despite some trepidation that this strident disciple of the now deceased Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would raise the issue of the Amanpour family's ties to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed by a revolution led by Khomeini with Ahmadinejad's active involvement. The interview came off without a hitch.

She received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Michigan in 2006 for her contributions to journalism.

She was made a CBE in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours