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Quick Facts
- NAME: Wendy Williams
- OCCUPATION: Radio Talk Show Host, Talk Show Host
- BIRTH DATE: July 18, 1964 (Age: 48)
- EDUCATION: Northeastern University
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Asbury Park, New Jersey
- ZODIAC SIGN: Cancer
Best Known For
Wendy Williams is a radio DJ and TV talk show host known for her no-nonsense attitude and brash on-air personality.
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Play NowWendy Williams. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 05:58, May 19, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056.
Wendy Williams. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056 [Accessed 19 May 2013].
"Wendy Williams." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 19 2013, 05:58 http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056.
"Wendy Williams," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056 [accessed May 19, 2013].
"Wendy Williams," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056 (accessed May 19, 2013).
Wendy Williams [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 19] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056.
Wendy Williams, http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056 (last visited May 19, 2013).
Wendy Williams. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/wendy-williams-524056. Accessed May 19, 2013.
Synopsis
On the radio, Wendy Williams delved deep into her own personal life, touching difficult subjects. Her tone struck a chord with listeners, and in the summer of 2008, BET aired a trial run of The Wendy Williams Show and gave it a full-scale run the following summer. In November 2008, while waiting for the premiere of her new program, Williams was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.
Quotes
"My bark is worse than my bite...by being tall and outgoing, people mistake that for being overpowering, overbearing, loud and being a bully."
Early Life
Author, television and radio talk show host Wendy Williams was born on July 18, 1964, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Williams' oversized, brash personality made her a force on the New York City FM airwaves. She is now the host of the BET television program, The Wendy Williams Show.
From an early age, Williams stood out. One of three children born to Thomas and Shirley Williams, she moved with her family at the age of five from Asbury Park to the middle class community of Ocean Township, New Jersey, where she spent the rest of her childhood.
At the outset, Williams says, she "spoke too loud, too fast, and too much," a characteristic that was in sharp contrast to her older, more bookish sister Wanda, a straight-A student who attended Tufts University at the age of 16.
Williams, on the other hand, was not an academic wonder. She was a big girl who, by the sixth grade, already stood 5-foot 7-inches and wore a size 11 shoe. With her parents pushing her, however, Williams became involved in many extra-curricular activities. She was a girl scout, played clarinet in the marching band, and competed on her high school swimming team. When it came time to select a college, she followed in Wanda's footsteps and relocated to Boston, where she attended Northeastern University and graduated in 1986 with a degree in communications and a minor in journalism.
Radio DJ
There, Williams got involved in radio. She hosted her own urban music show on the college's radio station, WRBB, and interned for the pioneering Boston deejay, Matt Seigel of Kiss 108. In her downtime, Williams took the train to New York City to hang out at Penn Station, where she would sit by herself and listen to some of her favorite radio personalities on a portable radio.
After college, Williams bounced around as she tried to make it in radio. Her first on-air job took her to a station in St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. Then it was on to New York, where she eventually got fired for not exactly sticking to the station's script. "It's been mostly, 'Read these liners, and play the hits' and 'You're saying too much' and 'Shut the hell up,'" Williams has said of her radio career.
After New York, Williams moved to Philadelphia, where she worked for three years before returning to Manhattan for a job at WBLS. There, Williams demonstrated that she didn't need to spin lot of records to draw big ratings. Instead, The Wendy Williams Experience delved deep into her own personal life, touching difficult subjects like her past struggles with drug addiction, her plastic surgeries and the hardships of trying to conceive.
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View groupTaking on topics of politics, entertainment, women's issues and more, female talk show hosts have proven to be every bit as engaging, intelligent, and funny as their male counterparts. Oprah Winfrey's 25-year-reign as the queen of talk is unparalleled, but many other female talk show hosts have come into their own as well, including Tyra Banks, Ellen DeGeneres, Sally Jessy Raphael and Kelly Ripa.
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