Vale: Barbara Walters

Towering US news presenter Barbara Walters, best known for her celebrity interviews and The View, has died aged 93.

Her publicist confirmed to Variety she died on Friday evening at her home in New York.

Walters blazed a trail for women in television news, becoming the highest-paid television journalist at one time, earning as much as $12 million per year at (US) ABC, where she worked from 1976 until her retirement in 2014. There was a further 12 years at NBC’s Today show prior to that.

She conducted interviews with the most prominent figures across politics and entertainment, from Katharine Hepburn to Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat. The Barbara Walters interview was considered definitive. Highly personable and ingratiating but with a tough core, Walters withstood critiques about the softness of her interrogatory style with celebrities and sometimes major political figures as well.

Walters’ 1999 interview of Monica Lewinsky was seen by 74 million viewers, the biggest audience ever for a journalist’s interview.

Walters asked Lewinsky, “What will you tell your children about this matter?” and Lewinsky replied, “I guess Mommy made some mistakes.” At that point Walters turned to the viewers and declared, “And that is the understatement of the century,” bringing the program to a dramatic conclusion.

She interviewed virtually every sitting president from Eisenhower, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump; many prominent world leaders, including the Shah of Iran, Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, China’s Jiang Zemin, the U.K.’s Thatcher, India’s Indira Gandhi plus Vaclav Havel, Muammar al-Gaddafi, King Hussein of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Still, she never earned the respect of prominent Washington and New York political journalists, always being viewed as ‘too soft.’

More recent interviews of superstars have included George Clooney, Matthew McConaughey, Patrick Dempsey, Jennifer Hudson, Helen Mirren, Eddie Murphy and Ellen DeGeneres.

As the first longtime co-host of Today, she broke barriers for women. In 1976, ABC lured her away with an unprecedented $1 million contract. When she sat beside Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News — albeit briefly — that glass ceiling was shattered. Working well into retirement age, she helped dispel age discrimination against women on television as well.

In 1997, Walters co-created daytime talkshow The View, which she co-hosted with women including Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O’Donnell and Joy Behar over the years. In May 2013 she announced that she would retire a year later to enjoy her good health.

Walters received multiple Daytime Emmy nominations for best talk show host, winning in 2003 and 2009, and she also received multiple Primetime Emmy nominations for her specials, winning in 1983. She also won a Daytime Emmy in 1975 for Today and shared a News and Documentary Emmy for her work at ABC on coverage of the turn of the millennium.

In September 2009, Walters was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the 30th annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards. She was also inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.