Barbara Walters, who broke barriers for women as the first female co-host of the Today show and the first female anchor of a network evening news program, and who as an interviewer of celebrities became one herself, helping to blur the line between news and entertainment, died Friday. She was 93.
Her death was reported by ABC News, where she was a longtime anchor and a creator of the talk show The View. Her publicist, Cindi Berger, said that Walters died at her home in Manhattan surrounded by loved ones. She did not give a cause.
Walters spent more than 50 years in front of the camera and, until she was 84, continued to appear on The View. In one-on-one interviews, she was best known for delving, with genteel insistence, into the private lives and emotional states of movie stars, heads of state and other high-profile subjects.
Walters first made her mark on the Today show on NBC, where she began appearing regularly on camera in 1964; she was officially named co-host a decade later.
Walters began at NBC as a writer in 1961, the token woman in the “Today” writers’ room. When she left NBC for ABC in 1976 to be a co-anchor of the evening news with Harry Reasoner, she became known as the million-dollar baby because of her five-year, $5 million contract.
The move to the co-anchor’s chair made her not only the highest-profile female journalist in television history, but also the highest-paid news anchor, male or female, and her arrival signaled something of a cultural shift: the moment when news anchors began to be seen less as infallible authority figures, in the Walter Cronkite mold, and more as celebrities.
The ABC experiment failed. Chemistry between the co-anchors was nonexistent, ratings remained low, and in 1978 Reasoner left for CBS, his original television home, and Walters’ role changed from co-anchor to contributor as the network instituted an all-male multiple-anchor format. Shortly after that she began contributing reports to ABC’s newsmagazine show “20/20.” In 1984, she became the show’s permanent co-host alongside Hugh Downs, her old Today colleague.
But it was her Barbara Walters Specials more than anything else that made her a star, enshrining her as an indefatigable chronicler of the rich, the powerful and the infamous. The specials, which began in 1976, made Walters as famous, or nearly as famous, as the people she interviewed.
At a time when politicians tended to be reserved and celebrities elusive, Walters coaxed kings, presidents and matinee idols to answer startlingly intimate questions.
Walters was a celebrity journalist who reveled in the role — driving a motorcycle with Sylvester Stallone, dancing the mambo with Patrick Swayze, riding a patrol boat with Fidel Castro across the Bay of Pigs. She was the reporter who urged Jimmy Carter to “be good to us” and asked former White House intern Monica Lewinsky — in an interview that attracted some 50 million viewers — why she kept that stained blue dress that had figured in the sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton.
Throughout her career, Walters raised eyebrows — and competitors’ ire — by courting high society and cultivating friendships with high-placed officials. The Shah of Iran was a friend; so were Roy Cohn and Brooke Astor. She was the only female television reporter on President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in 1972.
Her ambition and competitive spirit never let up. She was in Vietnam on vacation when Michael Jackson died in 2009, and sped across 8,000 miles and many time zones to sit with the Jackson family at the memorial in Los Angeles — and to host a special tribute on “20/20.”
She is survived by her daughter, Jacqueline Danforth.
Walters said she had inherited both her ambition and her insecurities from her father, Lou Walters, a Boston booking agent and vaudeville impresario who founded the Latin Quarter nightclubs in Boston, New York and Miami and whose fortunes rose and fell, dragging the family from Florida manors and penthouse apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to shabby rentals in Miami.
Barbara Walters was born in Boston to Walters and Dena (Seletsky) Walters on Sept. 25, 1929.
Her childhood, she said, was shaped by her complicated relationship with her elder sister, Jacqueline, who was mentally disabled. She died in 1985.