Longtime ABC News anchor Barbara Walters has passed away. The View creator and fixture of broadcast journalism was 93 years old, having a career that spanned 65 years. Walters retired in 2016, but not before making her start at a local NBC affiliate in New York upon graduation from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951.
From there, she sharked her way up the ladder, working on The Today Show before hopping over to ABC News, becoming the long-standing anchor for 20/20. She was also a mainstay for interviews with some of the most prominent newsmakers and world leaders. Waters became more of a household name when she was mocked over her speech impediment by the late comedian Gilda Radner in the early years of Saturday Night Live. At first, Waters did not receive Radner’s impersonation of Barbara “WaWa " but came to embrace it in later years. And in those years, she has earned nearly every accolade when it comes to broadcasting, not least being a 1989 inductee in the Television Academy Hall of Fame (via ABC News):
BREAKING: Barbara Walters, who shattered the glass ceiling and became a dominant force in an industry once dominated by men, has died. She was 93. https://t.co/tydwREgTb2 pic.twitter.com/b4jOEHVYFE
— ABC News (@ABC) December 31, 2022
In a career that spanned five decades, Walters won 12 Emmy awards, 11 of those while at ABC News.
She made her final appearance as a co-host of "The View" in 2014, but remained an executive producer of the show and 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.
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"No one was more surprised than I," she said of her on-air career. "I wasn't beautiful, like many of the women on the program before me, [and] I had trouble pronouncing my r's."
In her memoir, Walters wrote that she had dark hair, a sallow complexion and was often told she was skinny. She said her parents' term of endearment for her was "Skinnymalinkydin."
In 1976, Walters found a new home on ABC's "Evening News," making history as the first female co-anchor of an evening news program.
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In her inaugural broadcast on Oct. 4, 1976, with co-anchor Harry Reasoner, Walters scored an exclusive interview with Earl Butz, who had just resigned as President Gerald Ford's Secretary of Agriculture after it was revealed he told a racist joke. She also conducted a satellite interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on his plans to end his country's fighting with Lebanon.
At ABC, her interviews were wide-ranging and her access to public figures, unparalleled; Walters crossed the Bay of Pigs with Fidel Castro and conducted the first joint interview with Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin. She also developed a reputation for asking tough questions.
"I asked Vladimir Putin if he ever ordered anyone to be killed," she once recalled. "For the record, he said 'no.'"
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There were lighter interviews, too. For years, she hosted an annual Oscars special, in which she interviewed Academy Award nominees and was known for making a number of them reveal deeply personal information and even cry. In 1994, she launched the "Most Fascinating People" special, which aired every December and afforded her the opportunity to chat with the year's top newsmakers.
In 1999, an estimated 74 million viewers tuned in to watch Walters interview Monica Lewinsky about the former White House intern's affair with then-President Bill Clinton. Toward the end of the interview, Walters asked Lewinsky, "What will you tell your children when you have them?" Lewinsky replied, "Mommy made a big mistake" to which Walters quipped, "And that is the understatement of the year."
Barbara Walters. 93 years old. What a life.
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