Frank Rich facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Frank Rich
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Rich in 2004
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| Born | Frank Hart Rich Jr. June 2, 1949 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
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| Alma mater | Harvard University (BA) |
| Period | 1971–present |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
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Frank Hart Rich Jr. (born June 2, 1949) is an American essayist and liberal op-ed columnist, who held various positions within The New York Times from 1980 to 2011. He has also produced television series and documentaries for HBO.
Rich is currently writer-at-large for New York magazine, where he writes essays on politics and culture and engages in regular dialogues on news of the week for the "Daily Intelligencer". He served as executive producer of the long-running HBO comedy series Veep, having joined the show at its outset in 2011, and of the HBO drama series Succession.
Early life and education
Born on June 2, 1949, Rich grew up in Washington, D.C. His mother, Helene Fisher (née Aaronson), a schoolteacher and artist, was from a Russian Jewish family that originally settled in Brooklyn, New York City, but moved to Washington, D.C., following the stock market crash of 1929. His father, Frank Hart Rich, a businessman, was from a German Jewish family long-settled in Washington. He attended public schools and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1967.
Rich attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, the university's daily student newspaper. Rich was an honorary Harvard College scholar and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship. He graduated magna cum laude in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American history and literature.
Career
Before joining The New York Times in 1980, Rich was a film and television critic for Time, a film critic for The New York Post, and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine. In the early 1970s, he was a founding editor of the Richmond (Va.) Mercury.
Television
Since 2008, Rich has been a creative consultant for HBO, where he has helped initiate and develop new programming and was an Executive Producer of Veep, the long-running comedy series created by Armando Iannucci and starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He was also an Executive Producer of Succession, the HBO drama series created by Jesse Armstrong that debuted in June 2018 to critical praise.
Rich was also an Executive Producer for the HBO documentaries Six by Sondheim (2013), directed by James Lapine, and Becoming Mike Nichols (2016), directed by Douglas McGrath.
Awards
Rich's journalistic honors include the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005 and, in 2011, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University (also his alma mater). In 2011, Rich was awarded an honorary doctorate from The New School. In 2016, he received the Mirror Award for Best Commentary from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2015.
Rich was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in 1987 and 2005. In 2010, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Silurians Press Club.
Rich received Emmy Awards in 2015, 2016, and 2017 for Veep, which was named Outstanding Comedy Series, and in 2020 for Succession, which was named Outstanding Drama Series. He also received a Golden Globe in 2020 for Succession, which won the Best Drama Series prize. He has won three Peabody Awards: for Succession in 2020, for Veep in 2017, and, in 2013, for Six by Sondheim, which was also honored with the ASCAP Deems Taylor Television Broadcast Award.
Personal life
Rich lives in Manhattan with his wife, Alex Witchel, an author and journalist; they married in 1991. He has two sons from his previous marriage to Gail Winston: Simon Rich, a novelist and short story writer who created the television series Man Seeking Woman and was a writer for Saturday Night Live, and Nathaniel Rich, who is a novelist, journalist, and essayist.
Memoir
Frank Rich's memoir Ghost Light (2000) chronicles his childhood in the late 1950s and 1960s in Washington, D.C., with a focus on his lifelong adoration of the theater and the impact it had on his life.
