TV journalist, host of ’20/20′ and creator of ‘The View’ was 93 – Deadline

Barbara Walters, the Emmy-winning television personality and pioneer in male-dominated journalism, has died. She was 93.

“Barbara Walters, who shattered the glass ceiling and became a dominant force in a once male-dominated industry, has died,” ABC News tweeted Friday night.

Walters was the first woman to co-host a major morning show on the network, NBC Todayand later as an evening news anchor, albeit in an ill-conceived and ill-conceived attempt to pair her with Harry Reasoner on ABC in the mid-1970s.

But that setback was just the prelude to a career for one of television’s most famous news personalities. Her one hour Barbara Walters Specialsa mix of sit-downs with celebrities and other big names in bold, were a longtime ABC staple, while she had a weekly presence as co-host of 20/20re-pairing her with Hugh Downs, with whom she had worked Today. Later in her career, she later created one of the most popular (and copied) daytime talk shows, The View, hosting the show until 2014.

Related: Hugh Downs dies: Longtime news and entertainment broadcaster was 99

While Walters was dismissed by the male establishment as a figure who injected a personality-oriented, softer focus on major events, she defied the stereotype by landing interviews with world leaders including Golda Meir and Fidel Castro.

In her book audition, Walters recalled the frantic effort to get a joint interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977, when Sadat made a historic trip to Israel, to CBS’s Walter Cronkite. She did, as the network put it on the air seconds after.

“From that point on I was more or less accepted as a member of the old boys’ club,” she wrote.

The interview was one of many with world leaders where she became known for asking them personal questions – and at key moments. Two years before the Shah of Iran was exiled, she asked him if women were equal to men. “Not that far. Maybe you will in the future,” he replied. She asked Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, “In our country we read that you are crazy. Why do you think that is?” He laughed.

Walters had already broken barriers when she became the co-host of Today, but she was lured away from the show and NBC in 1976 when ABC came up with a plan to revive its evening news by pairing her with Reasoner. Although she had signed a lucrative $1 million-a-year deal — one that would make her the first female co-anchor of an evening news show — her relationship with Reasoner was frosty.

“The studio was cold and I was freezing,” Walters said in a 2000 interview with the Archive for American Television. “Harry wasn’t bad. He was unhappy there and unhappy with me and, as we later learned, was going through a lot of things in his personal life that none of us knew about at the time.

The awkward co-anchoring team continued until Reasoner left the network in 1978 for CBS, after which ABC abandoned the traditional evening news format in favor of World news tonightwith a series of anchors from locations in the US and Europe.

Although no longer co-anchoring the evening news, Walters hardly faded from the network spotlight. Her contract included a series of up close and personal promotions known as Barbara Walters’ Specialswhich became an instant ratings hit when it launched in 1976 with President-elect Jimmy Carter and Rosalyn Carter, and Barbra Streisand and John Peters.

Highlights of the special were Walters’ ability to get celebrities, including many who rarely sat down for interviews, to open up about their personal lives. Although over the years they’ve included Bing Crosby, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jackson, while she won big “gettings” for 20/20, including Monica Lewinsky in 1999. Cronkite himself sat down with Walters for an interview several years after he stepped down from the anchor chair in 1981.

Walters was also cheated – on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner poked fun at the way she pronounces her “R’s,” calling herself Baba Vava. Johnny Carson joked about a question Walters asked Katharine Hepburn, claiming she asked her, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” In fact, Walters followed up after Hepburn said she wanted to be a tree.

She later wrote that “to this day I am laughed at for asking what tree she wants to be. It doesn’t matter that she presented everything; I’m stuck with it.

Her interviews drew criticism. In 2000, Walters demanded that pop star Ricky Martin address rumors about his sexuality. “You could say, ‘Yes, I’m gay or no, I’m not,'” Walters told him. He refused, but later said he felt traumatized by the experience, and Walters herself said she regretted the question.

Barbara Jill Walters was born on September 25, 1929 in Boston to Lou and Dena Walters. Her father was a producer and nightclub manager, giving her an insight into show business and all its moments of triumph and turbulence at an early age as he moved the family to Miami and later New York.

After Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, she got a job at an advertising agency and later at the NBC affiliate in New York and eventually began producing programs in the early years of television in the 1950s. She eventually landed a job at NBC Today in 1961 he worked as a writer and researcher. This led to an on-air role, first with lighter segments as one of the Modern Girls, as they were known, and eventually with more substantial material.

Her profile continued to rise in the 1960s as she interviewed increasingly prominent figures, including First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, Rose Kennedy and Princess Grace, while attracting increasing press attention. In 1967, she received her first “serious and exclusive political interview,” as she put it, a meeting with former Secretary of State Dean Rusk. By the time Downs left the show in 1971, she was in all but name a co-host. But as she wrote, she was not even considered heir to the Downs “or any title that would have given me a position of equality”.

“The prevailing wisdom was that not only were men watching at home, but women were never going to accept a woman in an authoritarian role,” she wrote. “The host should have been a man.”

She had a rocky relationship with Downs’ successor, Frank McGee, and was not actually given the co-host title until McGee’s death and he was replaced by Jim Hartz in 1974. “A very satisfying title after sitting next to the male co-host in the morning desk at Today,” she wrote. “Ten years. It seems small by today’s standards, but in 1974 it was a breakthrough.

It was. Walters retired from ABC News in 2014, but continued to make occasional appearances over the next year, including an interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Walters has a daughter, Jacqueline “Jackie” Danforth, with her second husband Lee Guber, a producer, whom she married in 1963 and divorced in 1976. Walters’ first marriage, to Robert Henry Katz in 1955, was annulled two years later. Walters was also married twice to real estate developer and producer Merv Adelson, divorcing a second time in 1992.