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Sarah Keenlyside

Talk show host Conan O’Brien is grieving the loss of his beloved parents Dr Thomas O’Brien and Ruth Reardon O’Brien, who both passed away last week.

The Boston Globe reported that Thomas, a medical visionary and associate professor at Harvard Medical School until his retirement at the age of 90, and his wife Ruth, a Yale Law School graduate and only the second woman partner at her former law firm, passed away within days of each other.
In a touching tribute to his late father in the same publication, Conan called him “the funniest guy in the room”, adding, “When he would laugh, his whole body would convulse and he would almost hug himself.”
The comedian is all set to host the Oscars in 2025, but his career hasn’t always been smooth sailing. In 2009, he was famously asked to take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno, but was fired after just seven months so they could bring Leno back. One of his supporters at the time was his wife, Liza. “This was just really, really hard for him. It was watching someone’s heart get broken,” she told CBS in 2010. “The truth is, The Tonight Show was the definition of cultural relevancy for decades. And all of a sudden, it’s not. That’s not Conan’s fault.”
So what else do we know about Liza Powel O’Brien?
How did Conan O’Brien meet his wife, Liza Powel?

In 1999, O’Brien had a show called Late Night with Conan O’Brien and visited the offices of the advertising agency where Powel worked as a copywriter to film a comedy segment. “You can see me fall in love with her on camera,” O’Brien later said on one of his shows. “The best decision I’ve ever made in my life, including Late Night.”


Powel remembers that O’Brien became interested in her while filming the segment and asked lots of questions. “We were having this full on first date conversation out of nowhere and literally every other person was looking at each other like, should we go?” she told Mike Sweeney on the Inside Conan podcast.
They got married in her hometown

On the same podcast, Powel joked that she knew O’Brien was a keeper when she had a TMI moment on one of their early dates together. “My gynaecologist has told me I need to have all of my babies out of my body by the time I’m 34,” she recalled saying to O’Brien. “Literally that came out of my face, and he didn’t run away, which says something good or bad about him …”
The pair wed in St James Cathedral in Seattle – Powel’s hometown – in 2002 on a rainy January day. O’Brien’s Harvard roommate officiated and his very famous ex-girlfriend (Lisa Kudrow) even came along to celebrate the couple, per People.
She’s a playwright

Powel is no stranger to showbiz either – she just prefers to work behind the scenes. After getting a degree at Vassar College in New York and a masters in fiction from Columbia, she put her writing talents to work. To date she has written 12 plays including The Great Experiment, which was based on her time at Vassar, and 2022’s Lucky, which centres on a committee of do-gooders in LA trying to decide which “underprivileged teen” should get a scholarship to college. She currently hosts the podcast Significant Others.
She has two children with O’Brien

O’Brien and Powel welcomed their daughter Neve in 2003, then their son Beckett two years later. Now, aged 21, Neve has inherited her parents’ creativity and is currently an illustrator for the Yale Daily News Magazine. Her little brother, now 19, has been described as “a little Steve Jobs” by his father, per People.

Powel has talked openly about the challenges of motherhood, particularly when her children were younger. “When I had little kids and was too tired to put on real clothes, I contemplated wearing scrubs so people would think I was a doctor instead of just a tired mum,” she joked in an interview with Airmail.


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Liza Powel O’Brien and Conan O’Brien’s meet cute was captured on camera after he showed up at her advertising agency when she was a copywriter; they married in 2002, and Conan’s ex Lisa Kudrow attended


Liza Powel O’Brien and Conan O’Brien’s meet cute was captured on camera after he showed up at her advertising agency when she was a copywriter; they married in 2002, and Conan’s ex Lisa Kudrow attended.
