Barbara Jill Walters was an American broadcast journalist and television personality.
62 Facts About Barbara Walters
2.
Barbara Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NATAS in 2000 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.
3.
Barbara Walters began her career at WNBT-TV in 1953 as writer-producer of a news-and-information program aimed at the juvenile audience, Ask the Camera, hosted by Sandy Becker.
4.
Barbara Walters joined the staff of the network's Today show in the early 1960s as a writer and segment producer of women's-interest stories.
5.
Barbara Walters became known for an annual special aired on ABC, Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People.
6.
Barbara Walters interviewed both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, though not when each was president.
7.
Barbara Walters gained acclaim and notoriety for interviewing subjects such as Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Katharine Hepburn, Sean Connery, Monica Lewinsky, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Jiang Zemin, and Bashar al-Assad.
8.
Barbara Walters created, produced, and co-hosted the ABC daytime talk show The View; she appeared on the program from 1997 until she retired in 2014.
9.
Barbara Walters' father was born in London in 1898 and moved to New York City with his father and two brothers on August 28,1909.
10.
Barbara Walters worked as a Broadway producer and produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943; he was the entertainment director for the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
11.
Barbara Walters imported the Folies Bergere stage show from Paris to the resort's main showroom.
12.
Barbara Walters's elder sister, Jacqueline, was born with mental disabilities and died of ovarian cancer in 1985.
13.
Barbara Walters was a booking agent, and his job was not very stable.
14.
Barbara Walters said that being surrounded by celebrities when she was young kept her from being "in awe" of them.
15.
Barbara Walters went down to live in our house in Florida, and then the government took the house, and they took the car, and they took the furniture.
16.
Barbara Walters attended Lawrence School, a public school in Brookline, Massachusetts; she left halfway through fifth grade when her father moved the family to Miami Beach in 1939.
17.
Barbara Walters then went back to New York City after tenth grade, where she attended Birch Wathen School, another private school.
18.
Barbara Walters was employed for about a year at a small advertising agency in New York City and began working at the NBC network's flagship station WNBT-TV, doing publicity and writing press releases.
19.
Barbara Walters started producing for TV host Igor Cassini, but left the network after Cassini pressured her to marry him and started a fistfight with the man she was interested in.
20.
Barbara Walters went to WPIX to produce the Eloise McElhone Show, which was canceled in 1954.
21.
Barbara Walters became a writer on The Morning Show at CBS in 1955.
22.
Barbara Walters moved up becoming the show's regular "Today Girl," handling lighter assignments and the weather.
23.
Barbara Walters had a great relationship with host Hugh Downs for years.
24.
Barbara Walters was not named co-host of the show until McGee's death in 1974 when NBC officially designated Walters as the program's first female co-host.
25.
Barbara Walters became the first female co-host of a US news program.
26.
Barbara Walters said that the tension between the two was because Reasoner did not want to work with a co-anchor and because he was unhappy at ABC, not because he disliked Barbara Walters personally.
27.
Barbara Walters became Downs' co-host in 1984, and remained with the program until she retired as co-host in 2004.
28.
Barbara Walters was chosen to be the moderator for the third and final debate between candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, held on the campus of the College of William and Mary at Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall in Williamsburg, Virginia, during the 1976 presidential election.
29.
Barbara Walters was known for "personality journalism" and her "scoop" interviews.
30.
Barbara Walters interviewed other influential people including pop icon Michael Jackson, Katharine Hepburn, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and Sir Laurence Olivier in 1980.
31.
Barbara Walters considered Robert Smithdas, a deaf-blind man who spent his life improving the lives of other individuals who are deaf-blind, as her most inspirational interviewee.
32.
Barbara Walters had not but said she never showed up without them from then on.
33.
Barbara Walters said Hepburn's opinions stuck with her so much, she could repeat them almost verbatim from that point onward.
34.
In 2010 Barbara Walters said that she regretted having pushed him on the issue.
35.
Barbara Walters was a co-host of the daytime talk show The View; she was a co-creator and co-executive producer alongside her business partner, Bill Geddie.
36.
Barbara Walters retired from being a co-host on May 15,2014.
37.
Barbara Walters returned as a guest co-host on an intermittent basis in 2014 and 2015 even in retirement.
38.
On March 7,2010, Barbara Walters announced that she would no longer hold Oscar interviews but would still work for ABC and on The View.
39.
On March 28,2013, numerous media outlets reported that Barbara Walters would retire in May 2014 and that she would make the announcement on the show four days later.
40.
In May 2014 Barbara Walters confirmed six weeks later that she would be retiring from television hosting and interviewing, as originally reported; she made the official announcement on the May 13,2013, episode of The View.
41.
Barbara Walters announced that she would continue as the show's executive producer for as long as it "is on the air".
42.
In 2015, Barbara Walters hosted the documentary series American Scandals on Investigation Discovery.
43.
Barbara Walters continued to host 10 Most Fascinating People on ABC in 2014 and 2015.
44.
Barbara Walters explained her lifelong devotion to Cohn as gratitude for his help in her adoption of her daughter, Jacqueline.
45.
Barbara Walters testified as a character witness at Cohn's 1986 disbarment trial.
46.
Barbara Walters dated future US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in the 1970s and was linked romantically to United States Senator John Warner in the 1990s.
47.
Barbara Walters said they ended the affair to protect their careers from scandal.
48.
Barbara Walters was a close friend of Tom Brokaw, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and former Fox News head Roger Ailes from the late 1960s until he died in 2017.
49.
In 2013, Barbara Walters said she regretted not having more children.
50.
In May 2010, Barbara Walters said she would be having an open-heart operation to replace a faulty aortic valve.
51.
Barbara Walters had known that she was suffering from aortic stenosis, even though she was symptom-free.
52.
Barbara Walters died at her home in Manhattan on December 30,2022, at age 93.
53.
Barbara Walters began her career when the prevalent view among television executives was that females reporting news about war, politics and other important matters would be taken lightly by viewers.
54.
Barbara Walters's success is credited with creating career opportunities for future female network anchors, including Jane Pauley, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.
55.
Barbara Walters often got her interviewees to speak about their perspectives and share anecdotes.
56.
Barbara Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989.
57.
On June 15,2007, Barbara Walters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
58.
Barbara Walters won Daytime and Prime Time Emmy Awards, a Women in Film Lucy Award, and a GLAAD Excellence in Media award.
59.
In 2008, Barbara Walters was honored with the Disney Legends award, given to those who made an outstanding contribution to The Walt Disney Company, which owns the network ABC.
60.
On September 21,2009, Barbara Walters was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 30th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards at New York City's Lincoln Center.
61.
Barbara Walters's name appeared in the January 23,1995 New York Times Monday Crossword Puzzle.
62.
Barbara Walters published the book How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything in 1970, with the assistance of ghostwriter June Callwood.