WASHINGTON – Barbara Walters, the US television personality who helped define the news with interviews that often conferred celebrity as much as they revealed it, has died. She was 93.

Her death was reported by her long-time employer, ABC News. Mr Bob Iger, chief executive officer of Walt Disney Co, ABC’s parent company, said Walters died on Friday evening at her home in New York.

Walters spent more than a half-century on network television, as a host of NBC’s Today and ABC’s 20/20 programmes, as well as frequent specials such as her annual 10 Most Fascinating People show.

“Barbara was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself,” Mr Iger said in a statement.

“She was a one-of-a-kind reporter who landed many of the most important interviews of our time, from heads of state to the biggest celebrities and sports icons.”

A cultural touchstone whom Saturday Night Live lampooned as “Baba Wawa” for her lisp, she was America’s most enduring celebrity interviewer. Presidents and queens, movie stars and artists, criminals and victims all submitted to her questioning. She was renowned for evoking tears and unexpected revelations from her interviewees.

A list of her subjects reads like an All-Star roster of the past 50 years. She interviewed every US president in her time, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, as well as the shah of Iran, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, twice. In 1977, as they spoke aboard a boat, she asked Castro: “Do you feel funny crossing the Bay of Pigs with an American?”

‘Lucky’ career

“In this time of instant Internet news, cellphones that take videos, and a profusion of blogs where everyone is a reporter, there will be little chance for any single person to have the kind of career that I’ve had,” Walters wrote in her 2008 memoir.

“If I was, perhaps, atop of the game, I also had the advantage of being ahead of the game. How lucky I was.”

Her annual Oscars-night show became a coronation for Hollywood stars, including Tom Cruise, Clint Eastwood and Cher.

Murderers, too, could become celebrities in her hands. Walters broadcast interviews with Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, and Jean Harris, the head of an exclusive private school who was convicted of killing her lover, the prominent cardiologist and best-selling author Herman Tarnower.

In 1999, former White House intern Monica Lewinsky told Walters of her affair with then President Bill Clinton: “Sometimes I have warm feelings, sometimes I’m proud of him still, and sometimes I hate his guts.”

“What will you tell your children, when you have them?” Walters asked.

“Mommy made a big mistake.”

Walters countered: “And that is the understatement of the year.”

The show was seen by 74 million people, making it at the time the most widely viewed news programme ever aired by a single network.

Double dating

Her penchant for celebrity revelations, blending personality with news, extended to her own life, which did not always match her TV persona as a protector of social mores. In her memoir, the thrice-divorced Walters revealed an affair, starting in 1973, with then US Senator Edward Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts.

She also revealed that she simultaneously dated Alan “Ace” Greenberg, then a partner at investment bank Bear Stearns and later its chairman and chief executive, and the “soft-spoken” Alan Greenspan, then President Gerald Ford’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Having worked in TV production for several years, Walters moved in front of the camera for good in 1964 on NBC’s Today show. Her reputation soared among viewers and also newsmakers. They liked talking to Walters, who seemed to have a knack for building trust with the powerful and famous.

In 1971, she scored a rare on-camera solo interview with president Nixon, who took her along on his trip the following year to initiate diplomacy with the People’s Republic of China.

Compensation news

Walters signed a five-year contract for US$1 million a year with ABC Evening News in 1976, which made her the first female network news co-anchor. The salary, more than double any other network anchor’s, made headlines.

ABC co-anchor Harry Reasoner and Walters never gelled as a team. Ratings stagnated and she left the programme in 1978.

Undaunted, Walters joined ABC’s 20/20 news programme, where she worked as co-host with her old Today show colleague Hugh Downs. She stayed at the programme for about 25 years.

Barbara Jill Walters was born on Sept 25, 1929, in Boston, according to census records. Her mother was the former Dena Selett. Her father, Lou Walters, was a vaudevillian impresario who founded the Latin Quarter, one of the nation’s top nightclubs.

Family provider

In the 1940s, the family moved to Manhattan, where she attended private schools.

In 1953, she received a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

After her father sold his nightclub in 1957 and then lost his fortune, Walters was her family’s main source of support, she wrote.

Walters won 12 Emmy awards, all but one while at ABC, the network said.

She largely retired from television after signing off in 2014 from daytime programme The View, which she had launched in 1997.

Walters created a much-copied template for high-profile political and celebrity interviews – and blazed a trail for women in an industry run by white middle-aged men.

“How proud I am today when I see all the young women who are making and reporting the news,” Walters said on her last appearance on The View. “If I did anything to help that happen, that’s my legacy.”

Among the celebrities who appeared on the farewell episode of The View was Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful figures in US mass media.

“When I auditioned for my first television job, I walked in not knowing what to do, so I pretended to be Barbara Walters,” recalled Winfrey.

“I sat like Barbara and crossed my legs like Barbara,” she said.

Walters’ three marriages ended in divorce. She and her second husband Lee Guber adopted a daughter, Jacqueline. BLOOMBERG, AFP