Emmy Award Winning TV Journalist Barbara Walters Passes Away At 93
Walters is an Emmy award-winning journalist who has interviewed the most prominent figures across politics and entertainment, from Katherine Hepburn to Monica Lewinsky to Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat.
New Delhi: Celebrity interviewer, Barbara Walters, passed away aged 93. She was the highest-paid television journalist at one time, earning as much as $12 million per year at ABC. Walters is an Emmy award-winning journalist who has interviewed the most prominent figures across politics and entertainment, from Katherine Hepburn to Monica Lewinsky to Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat, according to Variety, a US-based news outlet.
Indira Gandhi, Menachem Begin, the Shah of Iran, Fidel Castro, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, Boris Yeltsin and every US President after Richard Nixon are among the world leaders Ms Walters interviewed, according to news agency AFP. ABC said in its report that Ms Walters won 12 Emmys during her time there, with just one exception.
She worked with ABC News from 1976 until her retirement. She retired from ABC News and from her popular show "The View" in May 2014. Before that, she put in 12 years at NBC's "Today" show. Walters received multiple Daytime Emmy nominations for best talk show host for her work on 'The View,' winning in 2003 and 2009, and she also received multiple Primetime Emmy nominations for her specials, winning in 1983.
She worked alongside Harry Reasoner on "ABC Evening News" until 1978, and received an industry-record salary of $1 million per year for her contributions to the news programme and special projects, Reuters reported. She also won a Daytime Emmy in 1975 for 'Today' and shared a News and Documentary Emmy for her work at ABC on coverage of the turn of the millennium, Variety reported.
Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston on September 25, 1929. Her father, Lou Walters, was a nightclub owner. She attended Miami Beach High School, New York's Fieldston School, and Birch Wathen School. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in English, as per Variety reports.
Walters was married three times, first to Bob Katz in 1955, to Lee Gubers, with whom she adopted a daughter, Jacqueline; and to TV producer Merv Adelson, whom she divorced for the second time in 1992.
(With ANI Inputs)