Celebrity news is sad to report that Barbara Walters, the legendary television news anchor and ABC correspondent, has died at the age of 93. Walters was a 12-time Emmy award winning trailblazer who paved the way for generations of female broadcast journalists.
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When Walters was hired at ABC News in 1976, she became the first female anchor on a nightly news program. In less than five years she became a co-host of the pioneering “20/20” news show, and to modern viewers she will be remembered as the founder of “The View” which debuted in 1997, is still on the air, and created the template for daytime infotainment shows.
Celebrity News – Barbara Walters Dead at Age 93
Walters spent 50 years in television and she last appeared on “The View” in 2014. At the time she said, “I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain. 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.”
“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.”
The female news icon was born Barbara Jill Walters in Boston on Sept. 25, 1929, to parents Dena and Louis Walters. Her father was a booking agent and nightclub producer who discovered comedians Fred Allen and Jack Haley.
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In her 2008 memoir, “Audition,” Walters shared that her ambition to succeed was inspired by her older sister, Jacqueline, who was developmentally disabled: “Her condition also altered my life. I think I knew from a very early age that at some point Jackie would become my responsibility. That awareness was one of the main reasons I was driven to work so hard. But my feelings went beyond financial responsibility.”
Barbara Walters Female News Pioneer
Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, in the 1950s. From there she worked in PR before being hired as a writer on NBC’s “Today” show in 1961. It would take her nearly 15 years, but eventually she became the program’s first female co-host in 1974, and won her first Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host in 1975.
One year later she was hired on at ABC’s “Evening News” making her the first female co-anchor of an evening news program.
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Barbara Walters Passes At Age 93
At ABC she interviewed world leaders and celebs including Fidel Castro, Menachem Begin, and Vladimir Putin. Walters had a reputation for being a straight shooter and when, in 1999, she interviewed Monica Lewinsky she asked, “What will you tell your children when you have them?” Lewinsky replied, “Mommy made a big mistake,” to which Walters responded, “And that is the understatement of the year.”
Walters was married four times to three men (she wed Merv Adelson twice) and adopted her daughter Jacqueline Guber with her second husband Lee Guber. She named her daughter after her sister.
After 25 years in television, Walters was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1989 and in 2000, Oprah Winfrey presented Walters a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Winfrey said, “Had there not been Barbara Walters, surely all of the other women who have followed in her footsteps, including myself, could not stand where we stand and do what we do in this industry today.”
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