Name at birth: Starlet Marie Jones

Star Jones is a lawyer and former prosecutor who was one of the co-hosts of the Barbara Walters daytime talk show The View until 2006. Jones was an assistant in the Brooklyn District Attorneys office when she was taken on at Court TV as a legal correspondent during the trial of William Kennedy Smith. She was hired to be a legal correspondent for NBC, where she interviewed Rodney King and Mike Tyson. She had a short-lived syndicated television show, Jones & Jury (1994), and in 1995 she joined the staff of Inside Edition. She was a regular co-host on The View when it made its debut in 1997. In June of 2006 she announced that her contract had not been renewed and she would be leaving the show. She briefly had her own cable show, The Star Jones Show. (2007-08)

In 1998 Jones published You Have to Stand for Something, or You’ll Fall for Anything… In 2004 she became engaged to New York banker Al Scales Reynolds; both belong to a number of charitable organizations. The View featured several segments on Jones’s nuptials, satisfying avid viewers and riling gossip columnists and irate fans who saw it as a way to get free goodies from corporate sponsors. Jones then went by the name Star Jones Reynolds. It was reported in March of 2008 that Jones was divorcing Reynolds.