Barbara Walters, the pioneering TV broadcaster who blazed a trail for women in a male-dominated medium, died Friday. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed by her representative, Cindi Berger, who said Walters died “peacefully in her home surrounded by loved ones.”
“She lived her life with no regrets,” Berger said. “She was a trailblazer not only for female journalists, but for all women.”
ABC, the network where she last worked, aired a special report Friday night announcing Walters’ death and reflecting on her career. Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, parent of ABC, said in a statement Walters died Friday evening at her New York City residence.
He called her “a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself.”
Walters was known in recent years as the co-creator and matriarch of the hit ABC daytime show “The View,” but older viewers remember her as the first female anchor of a network news program and the pre-eminent interviewer on television. She earned that reputation with a penchant for meticulous preparation, whether she was interviewing despots or divas, models or murderers.
“I do so much homework, I know more about the person than he or she knows about themselves,” Walters said in a 2014 television special.
That drive proved essential to her success. When she broke into the business in 1961 as a writer on NBC’s “TODAY” show, the idea of a woman sitting down and interviewing a sitting president on prime-time network television (which she did just over a decade later) seemed more fantasy than reality in an industry dominated by men like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
“She was playing in a field that was such an old boy’s network, literally and figuratively, and she didn’t take no for an answer,” Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, told NBC News before Walters’ death.
“At some point, the things that had been a liability for her, being a woman trying to get a foothold in a male-dominated industry, began to become more of an asset,” Thompson said. “She was smart and prepared, but at the same time she came across as more compassionate (than her male peers).
“Barbara Walters proved to be the evolutionary step between Edward R. Murrow and Oprah Winfrey.”
In some ways, Walters had been preparing for those trademark interviews all her life. Born in Boston on Sept. 25, 1929, Barbara Jill Walters got to see the rich and famous up close as the daughter of nightlife impresario Lou Walters, who owned clubs up and down the East Coast.
“I learned that celebrities were human beings,” Walters said in 2014. “I never thought of a celebrity as someone so perfect and wonderful that I should be put off.”
Inheriting her father’s drive, Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelors degree in English and broke into journalism as an assistant at NBC affiliate WRCA-TV. In 1955, she married businessman Robert Henry Katz, but her first love remained her fledgling career. The couple divorced three years later.
Hired as a writer and researcher on “TODAY,” Walters rose to become the only female producer on the show and started filing in on air occasionally as the “TODAY Girl,” a reporting role reserved for fashion shows, lifestyle trends and the weather that was previously held, among others, by Florence Henderson of “Brady Bunch” fame.
Hardly the kind of hard reporting to which Walters clearly aspired.
Off-air, Walters married the theater producer Lee Guber in 1963, with whom she adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, named after Walters’ older sister, who was developmentally disabled. The marriage would last 13 years.