Biography of Marie Colvin

Marie Catherine Colvin (January 12, 1956 – February 22, 2012) was an American journalist who worked for the British newspaper The Sunday Times from 1985. She was killed while covering the Siege of Homs in Syria.
Early life

Marie Catherine Colvin was born in Oyster Bay, Nassau County, on Long Island in New York State. She graduated from Oyster Bay High School in 1974 and attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1978.
Career

Colvin started her career a year after graduating from Yale as a midnight-to-6 a.m. police reporter for United Press International in New York City. In 1984, Colvin became the Paris bureau chief for United Press International, moving to The Sunday Times in 1985. Starting in 1986, she was the newspaper's Middle East correspondent, and then from 1995 was the Foreign Affairs correspondent. In 1986, she was the first to interview Muammar Gaddafi after Operation El Dorado Canyon. Although specializing in the Middle East, she also covered conflicts in Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and East Timor.




 In 1999 in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children from a compound besieged by Indonesian-backed forces. Refusing to abandon them she stayed with a United Nations force, reporting via her newspaper and on television. They were evacuated after four days. She won the International Women's Media Foundation award for 'Courage in Journalism' for her coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya. She wrote and produced documentaries, including Arafat: Behind the Myth for the BBC. She is featured in the 2005 documentary film Bearing Witness.

She began wearing an eyepatch after losing the sight in her left eye when coming under Sri Lankan government RPG shrapnel fire on April 16, 2001; she was attacked after calling out "journalist, journalist!" while reporting on the Sri Lankan Civil War. Colvin was also a witness and an intermediary during the final days of the war in Sri Lanka and reported on war crimes that were committed during this phase.

In 2011, while reporting on the Libyan civil war, she was offered an opportunity to interview Muammar Gaddafi, along with two other journalists that she could nominate. The first international interview since the start of the war, she took along her friends Christiane Amanpour of ABC News and Jeremy Bowen of BBC News.
Personal life

Colvin was married twice to journalist Patrick Bishop; both marriages ended in divorce. She also married journalist Juan Carlos Gumucio, who committed suicide in 2002. She lived in Hammersmith, West London.
Death

In February 2012, Colvin illegally crossed into Syria on the back of a motocross motorcycle, due to the Syrian government's attempts to prevent foreign journalists from covering the 2011–2012 Syrian uprising. Colvin was stationed in the western Baba Amr district of the city of Homs, and made her last broadcast on the evening of February 21, appearing on the BBC, Channel4, CNN and ITN News via satellite phone.

Colvin and award-winning French photographer Rémi Ochlik were killed on February 22 by a rocket, while fleeing a temporary media building that was being shelled by the Syrian Army. Fellow journalist Jean-Pierre Perrin and other sources reported that the building had been deliberately targeted by the Syrian Army, identified using satellite phone signals.
Awards

2000: Journalist of the Year: Foreign Press Association.
2000: Courage in Journalism: International Women's Media Foundation.
2001: Foreign Reporter of the Year:British Press Awards
2010: Foreign Reporter of the Year:British Press Awards (second award).