Andrea Thompson Biography

Andrea Thompson is a model-turned-actress-turned-journalist known for her move from acting on the show NYPD Blue to a new career as a TV news reader.

Andrea Thompson began her modeling career as a teen, and later studied acting at New York’s prestigious Actors Studio. She landed a role in the sci-fi series Babylon V (1994-95, as telepath Talia Winters) and then co-starred on the cop show NYPD Blue, where she played detective Jill Kirkendall from 1996-99.

In early 2000 she surprised her fans by moving to New Mexico and taking a job as news anchorwoman on a local station. In 2001 Thompson joined cable network CNN as an anchor of its Headline News programming. The hiring led to some criticism of CNN after it became known that Thompson had almost no journalism experience, was a high school dropout (she has the equivalent of a diploma) and had once posed nude for magazine photographs (the photos were for Black & White, what Thompson described as “a prestigious artistic pulbication”).

Andrea Thompson quit CNN unexpectedly in March of 2002 , saying it was time “to make a change in my daily professional life.” She has since returned to occasional acting jobs, appearing in 24 (the 2003 season, opposite Kiefer Sutherland) and Heroes (in 2008), and hosting the show Psychic Detectives on Court TV.