LEGENDARY reporter Barbara Walters has passed away at 93.
In a career spanning several decades, Walters is often credited with shattering the glass ceiling in a once male-dominated industry.
Iconic newswoman, Barbara Walters has passed away at 93
Walters and Harry Reasoner hosting the ABC Evening News in 1976
Walters created The View in 1997 and stayed as a co-host until 2014
She won 12 Emmy awards throughout her career
In 1976, Walters became the first female anchor on an evening news program when she joined ABC News.
Three years later, she co-hosted 20/20 and would launch The View in 1997.
She retired from the program in 2014 but remained an executive producer and still continued to do some interviews and specials for ABC News.
“I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain,” she said at the time.
“I want instead to sit on a sunny field and admire the very gifted women — and ok, some men too – who will be taking my place.”
Throughout her career, Walters won 12 Emmy Awards, 11 of them with ABC News.
Walters was born on September 25, 1929, to Dena and Louis Walters in Boston, Massachusetts.
Her father worked as a booking agent and nightclub producer, discovering comedians such as Fred Allen and Jack Haley, who would star as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.
Throughout her childhood, Walters was surrounded by celebrities, which taught her a lesson at an early age.
“I would see them onstage looking one way and offstage often looking very different,” she said in a 1989 interview with the Television Academy of Arts & Sciences
“I would hear my parents talk about them and know that even though those performers were very special people, they were also human beings with real-life problems.
“I can have respect and admiration for famous people, but I have never had a sense of fear or awe.”
She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and found work as a publicist and television writer before working as a writer on NBC’s Today show in 1961.
She became the program’s first female co-host in 1975.
A year later, she won her first Emmy award for Outstanding Talk Show Host.
“No one was more surprised than I,” she said. “ wasn’t beautiful, like many of the women on the program before me, [and] I had trouble pronouncing my r’s.”
NOT AFRAID
Walters was known for her high-profile interviews and for asking tough questions.
“I asked Vladimir Putin if he ever ordered anyone to be killed,” she once said. “For the second, he said ‘no.’”
She crossed the Bay of Pigs with Fidel Castro, writing in a statement following his death in 2016 that “he made clear to me that he was an absolute dictator and that he was a staunch opponent of democracy.”
“I told him that what we most profoundly disagreed on was the meaning of freedom.”
She hosted an annual Oscars special, interviewing Academy Award nominees in which she was known to make several of them reveal personal information and even cry.
In 1994, she started the Most Fascinating People special, airing every December.
In 1999, she sat with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky to ask about her affair with then-President Bill Clinton.
Walters asked “What will you tell your children when you have them?”
Lewinsky replied: “Mommy made a big mistake.”
Walters was quick to respond: “And that is the understatement of the year.”
An estimated 74million viewers watched the iconic interview.
Walters interviewed every US president and first lady from Richard and Pat Nixon to Barack and Michelle Obama – and interviewed former President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump before they entered the White House.
Through The View, Walters helped to create a forum for women from different backgrounds to come together and discuss the most pressing topics in the news.
In 2019, the New York Times Magazine dubbed the program “The most important political TV show in America.”
Walters interviewed Monica Lewinsky in 1999
She interviewed every US president from Richard Nixon [pictured here on May 8, 1980] to Barack Obama
Walters remained as an executive producer after leaving The View
More to follow…For the latest news on this story, keep checking back at Sun Online.The-sun.com is your go-to destination for the best celebrity news, sports news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures and must-see videos. Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheSunUS and follow us from our main Twitter account at @TheUSSun.
Did you miss our previous article...
https://thecelebreport.com/television/frankie-essex-reveals-christmas-day-disaster-after-emergency-with-twin-babies
