Television news pioneer, 1st female network anchor
NEW YORK
Barbara Walters, the intrepid interviewer, anchor and program host who blazed the way as the first woman to become a TV news superstar during a career remarkable for its duration and variety, has died. She was 93.
ABC broke into its broadcast to announce Walters’ death on air Friday night.
“She lived her life with no regrets. She was a trailblazer not only for female journalists, but for all worulers, men,” her publicist Cindi Berger also said in a statement, adding Walters died peacefully at her New York home.
An ABC spokesman did not have an immediate comment Friday night beyond sharing a statement from Bob Iger, the CEO of ABC parent The Walt Disney Company.
“Barbara was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself,” Iger said.
During nearly four decades at ABC, and before that at NBC, Walters’ exclusive interviews with royalty and entertainers brought her celebrity status that ranked with theirs, while placing her at the forefront of the trend that made stars of TV reporters.
Late in her career, she gave infotainment a new twist with “The View,” a live ABC weekday kaffee klatsch with an all-female panel for whom any topic was on the table and who welcomed guests ranging from world leaders to teen idols.
Walters made headlines in 1976 as the first female network news anchor, with an unprecedented $1 million salary that drew gasps.
“I never expected this!” Walters said in 2004, taking stock of her success. “I always thought I’d be a writer for television. I never even thought I’d be in front of a camera.”
In May 2014, she taped her final episode of “The View” amid much ceremony to end a five-decade career in television (although she continued to make occasional TV appearances ). During a commercial break, a throng of TV newswomen she had paved the way for — including Diane Sawyer,
Katie Couric, Robin Roberts and Connie Chung — posed for a group portrait.
“I have to remember this on the bad days,” Walters said quietly, “because this is the best.”
Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1943 and eventually landed a “temporary,” behindthe-scenes assignment at “Today” in 1961.
She had the first interview with Rose Kennedy after the assassination of her son, Robert, as well as with Princess Grace of
Monaco and President Richard Nixon.
Although she gained celebrity status in her own right, the celebrity world was familiar to her even as a little girl. Her father was an English-born booking agent who turned an old Boston church into a nightclub. Lou Walters opened other clubs in Miami and New York, and young Barbara spent her after-hours with regulars such as Joseph Kennedy and Howard Hughes.
By 2004, when she stepped down from “20/ 20,” she had logged more than 700 interviews, ranging from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Moammar Gadhafi, to Michael Jackson, Erik and Lyle Menendez and Elton John. Her two-hour talk with Monica Lewinsky in 1999, timed to the former White House intern’s memoir about her affair with President Bill Clinton, drew more than 70 million viewers.
Walters’ first marriage to businessman Bob Katz was annulled after a year. Her 1963 marriage to theater owner Lee Guber, with whom she adopted a daughter, ended in divorce after 13 years. Her five-year marriage to producer Merv Adelson ended in divorce in 1990. Walters wrote a bestselling 2008 memoir “Audition,” which caught readers by surprise with her disclosure of a “long and rocky affair” in the 1970s with married U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.
Walters is survived by her daughter, Jacqueline Danforth.