US TV journalist Barbara Walters passes away at 93
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Barbara Walters was the first woman to lead an evening news show in the United States.
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Barbara Walters (Getty Images)
Barbara Walters, the first woman to lead an evening news show in the United States, died at the age of 93, her long-time employer ABC announced late Friday.
Walters interviewed a slew of US presidents, foreign leaders like Anwar Sadat and Fidel Castro, and A-list celebrities over the course of a five-decade career, becoming a touchstone of American culture in the process.
ABC did not specify the cause or location of Walter's death.
Walters won 12 Emmys, all but one while at ABC, as per the network.
She mainly disappeared from television after leaving the afternoon show "The View", which she founded in 1997, in 2014.
Walters pioneered the use of a template for high-profile political and celebrity interviews.
Her formal journalism career began in 1961 when she joined NBC's morning news and entertainment show "Today".
When Walters joined "ABC Evening News" in 1976, she became the first woman to anchor a US evening news program, earning a then-unprecedented salary of one million dollars per year.
Three years later, she was selected co-host of the news magazine show "20/20", kicking off a career that would span more than two decades.
Walters had interviewed every US president and first lady since Richard Nixon before quitting television.
Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Saddam Hussein, and Vladimir Putin were among Walters' many interviewees, as were Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie, and Harrison Ford.
Walters was born in Boston and earned an English degree from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1953.
She began her career at NBC as a secretary, then as a writer, before becoming the network's first female anchor in 1974, co-hosting the morning "Today" program. She would join ABC two years later.
