You may recognize Diane Sawyer as the breezy co-anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America, covering everything from spring styles on a budget to the Iraq war alongside co-anchor Robin Roberts. One morning, her guest is Nicole Richie and the next it’s Barack Obama or Queen Noor of Jordan. The interviews are often exclusive to Sawyer and ABC; celebutantes and world leaders alike will only sit down to talk with the best. Behind this perky A.M. TV personality is a fiercely driven and boundary-breaking career journalist.

Born in Glasgow, Kentucky in 1945, Sawyer remains at the top of her game more than forty years after her career began – and in the image-centric television industry, that’s no small feat for a woman.

Though noted for her looks, Sawyer soon proved that talent and intelligence spoke volumes more than her long legs and blonde hair, and skillfully navigated the male-dominated field of TV news.

Sawyer began her career in broadcast news in 1967 in Louisville, Ky., as a reporter for the local WLKY-TV. In 1970, she joined President Richard Nixon’s administration where she held several positions including helping Nixon write his memoirs.

After her stint in politics, Sawyer spent nine years at CBS, where she truly began to break ground as the first woman to co-anchor the evening news show, 60 Minutes. She worked her way up to the 60 Minutes position, as CBS News’ State Department correspondent and the co-anchor of CBS Morning News.

In 1989, it was on to the next network to conquer and Sawyer made the move to ABC News. In February she became the co-anchor of Primetime Live. At Primetime, Sawyer traveled across the U.S. and abroad to report on a huge range of topics. She was one of the first Western journalists to expose the plight of women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan as part of her report from “behind the burqua.”

At ABC, she put together an acclaim-winning two-hour special on gay adoption and the foster care system and was one of the reporters at the forefront of Sept. 11 coverage. Sawyer has interviewed Saddam Hussein (in the first Western TV interview granted by Hussein in over a decade), Cuban President Fidel Castro, Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox, former first lady Nancy Reagan about her husband’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease, and conducted the first interview at home with the Clintons after Bill Clinton won the 1992 election. She got interviews first and exclusively and was able to draw deeply personal information from many of those interviewees.

Beyond this, Diane Sawyer has won awards for investigative works on topics from daycare abuse to biological weapons in Russia and the realities of maximum security prisons in America. She conducted a hidden-camera investigation of racial discrimination, revealing the different experiences of blacks and whites in America, which won the Grand Prize in the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.

She was named co-anchor, with Charles Gibson, of Good Morning America in January 1999.

These experiences just scratch the surface of Diane Sawyer’s career, which includes travel throughout restricted and dangerous regions of the Middle East and North Korea.

Based in New York, Sawyer lives with her husband, Hollywood director Mike Nichols. Today, the 64-year-old shows no sign of slowing down, continuing her work as a contributor ABC News and waking the country up each morning on Good Morning America.

Below, check out Diane get down to the tough questions with Barack Obama during his campaign for president.