Adrienne Clarkson has been a major cultural force in Canada for more than 35 years. She began her career in broadcasting in 1965 as a book reviewer on CBC-TV. She then became interviewer and host of the long-running CBC daytime magazine show Take Thirty. After ten years there, she spent seven years as host of The Fifth Estate, another long-running magazine program, this one in prime time.

In 1982 Clarkson was appointed agent general for Ontario in France, a high-level government position in which she promoted the province and acted as a cultural liaison between the two countries. When she returned to Canada in 1987, she became president and publisher of McClelland and Stewart, one of Canada’s most prestigious publishing firms, where she maintained her own imprint, Adrienne Clarkson Books. At the same time, she resumed her work in television as host and executive producer of her own CBC program—Adrienne Clarkson’s Summer Festival—in 1988. Its successor, Adrienne Clarkson Presents, was a prime-time cultural affairs series on which Clarkson offered profiles of Canadian and international figures from the worlds of opera, ballet, folksinging, and the other arts.

Despite the variety of her work in journalism, news, the arts, and cultural policy, Clarkson has been perceived as an elitist. For many years, she was lampooned by Canadian comics such as those of the Royal Canadian Air Farce and Double Exposure. In one skit, a haughty, modulated voice introduces itself, “I’m Adrienne Clarkson . . . and you’re not.” Because her most recent programs were arts oriented and because she was involved in arts activities and posts of distinction, Clarkson was regarded as having limited commercial appeal. Indeed, like most arts programs, hers did not garner high ratings, but they were highly regarded by critics.

Clarkson won numerous television awards, including three Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) Awards for Take Thirty and The Fifth Estate. In 1993 she was the recipient of a Gemini Award (which succeeded the ACTRA Awards as the national television awards) for Best Host in a Light Information, Variety, or Performing Arts Program for Adrienne Clarkson Presents.

In 1992 Clarkson wrote, produced, and directed her first film, a full-length drama-documentary for television, called Artemisia, about the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose rape by an artist friend of her father’s informed her work. Clarkson was passionately involved in this production, which premiered at the 1992 Toronto International Film Festival and was then aired on Clarkson’s series. She then wrote and directed three other documentaries for television between 1994 and 1996.

From 1995 to 1999, Clarkson was chairwoman of the board of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. In 1999 Clarkson was appointed Canada’s Governor General (representative for the queen of the British Commonwealth), a post she continues to hold; since this appointment, she no longer hosts or produces television programs.