The lanky southerner is the host of The Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

A native of North Carolina, Rose grew up working in his family's general store before heading off to Duke. After earning a degree from Duke Law School in 1968, he moved to New York and took a finance job at Banker's Trust, moonlighting on the weekends as a reporter for WPIX-TV. He soon quit finance altogether and went to work full-time with Bill Moyers, eventually becoming executive producer for Moyers' news shows and, in 1978, landing his own talk show in Dallas. By the early 1980s, Rose had gone national: He was the anchor of the CBS news program Nightwatch, the network's first late night news broadcast. In 1990, he left CBS; the interview-focused Charlie Rose Show debuted on Thirteen/WNET in 1991 and went into national syndication two years later. In 2008 he became a contributor on 60 Minutes, and in 2012 he began a stint as the anchor of a new CBS program, CBS This Morning.

Rose's show isn't much to look at-it's just him and his interviewee sitting at a table with two glasses of ice water in front of them. And while he generally plays nice with the people who sit down for a chat, he remains one of the last TV hosts in the infotainment age who's still game for a serious interview, a rarity today when the average television sit-down is cut into six-second soundbites. The list of celebs to grace Rose's stage is long and varied, but Jay-Z, Bill Clinton, and Jerry Seinfeld are among the big names to appear on the show.

For 12 years Rose was married to Mary Rose (née King), but their marriage ended in divorce in 1980. Rose was linked to a number of ladies following his divorce, but in 1993 he met Amanda Burden, the step-daughter of CBS founder William S. Paley, and the two have been together ever since. [Image via Getty]