Meredith Vieira
Meredith Vieira is an actor, born 1953.
A broadcast journalist who became one of American daytime television's most reliable hosts, Meredith Vieira has a career shaped the opposite way round from most. She was the original moderator of The View from 1997, stayed nine years, and left it for the NBC morning news program Today, where she co-hosted from 2006 to 2011.
The overlap is the impressive part. From 2002 to 2013 she also hosted the syndicated daytime version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, an eleven-year run in a format that chews through hosts, while working a hard news shift in the mornings. Our records list Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Game Show Host (twice), Outstanding Morning Program and Outstanding Special Class Special, plus News and Documentary Emmy recognition. That is an unusual spread of trophies for one person.
Her fiction credits are a footnote, and a funny one. She is a Broomsy Witch in Shrek Forever After, an unseen newscaster in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, a Lilliputian in Gulliver's Travels, and the host of an invented programme called 'Balance of Power' in The Stepford Wives. She also shows up as herself in archive footage inside true crime films like The Craigslist Killer, which is what happens when you are on television every morning for years.
Our catalog dates 25 Words or Less to 2018, and she hosts it: fast, chatty, and much harder than she makes it look.
Movies (8)
TV (8)
Where to start with Meredith Vieira
Watch her work in the syndicated daytime run of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the eleven years she fronted, where the job is keeping a stranger calm while a great deal of money sits on the table. She is better at that than the format usually rewards.
The View is the historical document: the original panel, years before the show became what it is now, with her holding the table to a subject. 25 Words or Less is the current one and the lightest.
The film appearances are a scavenger hunt rather than a filmography. The Stepford Wives has her introducing a fictional talk show, Shrek Forever After buries her in a witch, and Gulliver's Travels drops her among the Lilliputians. None of them need you, but they are fun to spot.