Millions of viewers tune in every morning to be greeted by Savannah Guthrie,
the long-time co-anchor of NBC's Today Show.
She's had a long and unconventional journey to becoming the reporter that she is today.
Keep watching for a closer look at how she's transformed over the years.
Guthrie was born on December 27, 1971 in Melbourne, Australia, and she was just
2 years old when her family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she spent most of her childhood.
Having your entire life uprooted at such a young age sounds pretty difficult, but Guthrie wasn't
old enough at the time to remember moving across the globe. However, that doesn't mean that being
born in another country didn't have an impact on her life. As she told People Magazine in 2020,
"Growing up and knowing that I was born in Australia was
always this interesting exotic part of my history that I love."
"This is the country where I was born! It's a part of my history that I always treasured."
Guthrie's childhood in Tucson may not have been as exotic as the Land Down Under,
but that doesn't mean it wasn't happy. She even got a head start in mixing it
up with famous people, or at least one person who would grow up to be famous,
as one of her high school classmates was Olympic runner and former NFL player Michael Bates.
Guthrie's parents, Nancy and Charles, raised their three children while grounding them
in the Baptist faith and focusing on their individual personalities.
As Guthrie explained to Refinery29 in 2017,
"My parents put a lot of emphasis on who you are and who you are when no one is looking."
This fundamental belief has pervaded Guthrie's life and has also played
a role in how she raises her own children. Her parents always stressed that who you are
is much more important than your physical appearance or how good you are at sports.
Guthrie was particularly close to her father. As she described him on Today's website in 2017,
"My father was a seemingly unlikely mix of qualities: always strong, sometimes terrifying,
loyal to the end, and disarmingly gentle and tender when it counted."
But it was her dad's integrity that had the biggest impact on his daughter. As she put it,
"His moral clarity was demanding and sometimes intimidating, but he tempered it,
at the moment you needed and least expected it, with kindness and mercy."
When Guthrie was just 16 years old, her father died of a heart attack.
Up until that point, her mother Nancy had been a stay-at-home mom.
Suddenly thrust into the harsh reality of supporting and raising three kids on her own,
Nancy was able to get a job working in public relations for the University of Arizona where
Savannah and her sister Annie were lucky enough to attend tuition-free. Guthrie has admitted that
she wasn't much of an overachiever in life until she had to be. As she told Refinery29,
"I wasn't much of a go-getter in my younger years. In high school,
I was kind of a slacker. It was only in college when I started taking journalism
classes that the fire was lit, and I really wanted to accomplish things. Before that,
I was happy to hang out with my friends and listen to grunge music and wear my chunky heels."
Guthrie reflected on that difficult time of her life in an open-letter essay to
her mother that she wrote for Good Housekeeping in 2017, as she shared,
"I think about when Dad passed away so suddenly [...] I remember how we clung to
each other for dear life in the years that followed. Your strength and selflessness
in the face of that shock amazes me to this day."
In 1993, Guthrie graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Arizona and then
promptly moved to Butte, Montana, where she got her big break as an anchor on a local TV station.
Unfortunately, though, the station closed down just 10 days later, and Guthrie found herself
forced to head back home to Tucson without a job. But she then quickly landed a gig as a reporter
and anchor in Columbia, Missouri. She worked there for the next two years with a focus on legal
journalism that would earn her the "Excellence in Legal Journalism Award" from the Missouri Bar.
In 1995, Guthrie was offered a job at an NBC affiliate in Tucson,
where she thrived for five years until getting an offer from a Washington D.C. affiliate in 2000
that would see her cover the 9/11 attacks and other major news stories of the time.
But it was at this point that she decided to make a big change and pursue a career in law.
In 2002, after receiving the highest score on the Arizona bar,
she joined a D.C. law firm and specialized in white-collar criminal defense for a year.
Based on her backstory, it's clear that Savannah Guthrie is a bit of a restless spirit. Just a
few months before starting a prestigious job as a law clerk for a federal judge,
she decided to reverse a previous big decision, as she quit her legal career to return to journalism.
As she recalled during a commencement speech to the 2019 class of George Washington University,
"It wasn't my dream. What I really wanted was to go back to my roots in journalism.
I still had that nagging hope that one day I could really make it in television news."
After working as a CourtTV correspondent from 2004 to 2006,
Guthrie found herself in the role of NBC News legal correspondent.
After a high-profile interview with Sarah Palin, she was offered the role of NBC's
White House correspondent in December of 2008. Her enigmatic personality and comfort in front
of the camera caught the eye of higher-ups at NBC who were contending with Ann Curry's recent
controversial departure as co-host of the morning program. After many guest appearances on Today,
Guthrie was officially offered the role of co-host in 2012, and she's been with the show ever since.
Joining Today was a big moment in Guthrie's career,
but it was also bittersweet as it was a turbulent time for the show.
She was brought on as a replacement for Ann Curry, who was unceremoniously and
unexpectedly booted from the position in 2012. As Curry recalled to Elle Magazine in 2020,
"I still don't really understand [why I was replaced]. I know I did nothing wrong.
I know I was good at my job."
When Guthrie took over the co-hosting gig, NBC seemed to want to draw as little attention as
possible to the switch, and her debut was accordingly met with very little fanfare.
The entire situation was tense, and Guthrie wasn't even sure if she wanted to accept
the position when it was offered to her. As she told The New York Times in 2020,
"Anyone would dream to get to host the Today show one day. But not like that.
I knew it was not a good situation, and potentially it’d be the end of my career."
She added,
"When my boss asked me, ‘Would you want to do this job?’ I said 'I don’t know.'
Not because I was being coy. I truly didn’t know! I wondered, ‘If I do this, and if it’s
such a controversy, it would be so easy to fail and never work in this business again.'"
In 2005, Guthrie married BBC journalist Mark Orchard, but their union ended a
few years later in 2009, leaving Guthrie to focus on her professional goals while
putting her personal life on hold. But the same year that she divorced,
she met and started dating media consultant Mike Feldman. After five years of dating,
they married in 2014 with the exciting news that a baby was on the way as well,
something that Guthrie had thought was off the table for her as a 42-year-old woman.
Five months after the wedding, they welcomed their daughter Vale, and two years later they were
blessed with another child, a boy named Charley. As Guthrie recalled to People Magazine in 2019,
"When we found out we were pregnant, I don't think there were two happier people on this planet."
She also discovered the perks of becoming a mom later in life, as she noted,
"Now, I can really take my time and enjoy our kids."
Guthrie often has to wake up before the crack of dawn to host the Today show. But while getting
up at 3 A.M. may be rough, she likes that it allows her to spend more time with her
kids since she's usually done with her work day by lunchtime. As she told Refinery29 in 2017,
"I come home and I see so much of my kids, and that means everything to me."
Guthrie has mastered the art of balancing her work life and home life about as well as
anyone can. As she described it to Refinery29,
"I often reflect on how lucky I am and how, in a cosmic sense, the timing was so perfect.
This job is completely rewarding and demanding and it does afford
me the opportunity to be home midday. As a working mom, that is a dream come true."
"We all have the children that God intends us to have."
Guthrie put her creative juices to good use in 2017 when she co-wrote a children's
picture book called Princesses Wear Pants. She co-wrote it with Allison Oppenheim after they
discovered that both of their daughters were obsessed with all things related to princesses.
This book isn't your average fairy tale, as it sends a powerful message of empowerment.
Guthrie got the idea for it after she saw Kate Middleton donning pants. She and Oppenheim
created a character named Penelope Pineapple who's the epitome of a storybook princess.
She loves to get all glammed up, but she also wears pants while taking care of business.
With the book, Guthrie wants to show her daughter and all kids that, princess or not,
the most important thing, as she told Today, is to "be a person of substance."
"I like that she's both strong and proud, but gentle and humble."
Guthrie found herself in the spotlight even more than usual during the 2020 presidential
election when she and Donald Trump went head to head during a town hall hosted by NBC that she
moderated in October. Many praised Guthrie for, as The Guardian put it, "keeping Trump in check,"
as she questioned him on topics like the way he handled the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. But
others were more critical, with Trump's campaign accusing her of being a "Joe Biden surrogate."
Guthrie has long had a reputation of not shying away during interviews,
but she was nevertheless surprised by how hard she came down on Trump for
seemingly endorsing conspiracy theories. As she declared to him at the town hall,
"You're the president. You're not like someone's crazy uncle who can retweet whatever."
"You want to be a leader, but you also are a leader and a setter of an example."
After the event, Guthrie admitted to being shocked at herself. As she told The New York Times,
"I don't even know if it's a good thing that I said it. That just came out."
Savannah Guthrie may look like she has it all together, but just like the rest of us,
she's only human. Being rich and famous is all well and good, but it's not enough for her to
quell the doubts she has about her own appearance. As she confessed to Health Magazine in 2020,
"It's a lifelong struggle for me. I've never once felt good about how I looked on the outside."
Guthrie is gorgeous enough that she was featured in People Magazine's "Beautiful Issue" in 2019,
but validation from others doesn't necessarily equate to self-acceptance.
And that's exactly what she's spent so long striving for. Learning to
love how she looks is a journey, and she's determined not to pass her own feelings of
inadequacy on to the next generation. As she declared to Health Magazine,
"That's just not healthy. I really think about it with my daughter, because I just don’t want
to pass that on to her. It holds us back from joy. We should be happy and proud of our bodies."
We have to agree that Guthrie should certainly be proud of her body,
as well as everything else she's accomplished!
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