Jean Kathleen Rook was an English journalist dubbed The First Lady of Fleet Street for her regular opinion column in the Daily Express.
21 Facts About Jean Rook
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Jean Rook was the daughter of an engineer, Horace Rook, a consultant engineer from Boston, Lincolnshire, and a cinema usherette, Freda Garton.
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Jean Rook was born in Kingston upon Hull and raised in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
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Jean Rook was educated at Malet Lambert High School in Hull and Bedford College, part of the University of London, where she became the first woman to edit the university's Sunday newspaper, Sennet.
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Jean Rook read English, and graduated in 1954 with an upper second-class degree.
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Jean Rook began her professional career as a reporter on the Sheffield Telegraph, where she had won a place on their graduate trainee scheme.
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Jean Rook became the women's editor, before becoming fashion editor at The Yorkshire Post in Leeds.
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Jean Rook moved from The Sun to the Daily Sketch, and the circulation "soared" when she ran a 'Save our mini-skirt' campaign for the editor, David English, at a time when hemlines were falling.
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Whilst English was editor, the newspaper merged with the Daily Mail in 1971, and Jean Rook was appointed women's editor of the latter publication.
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Jean Rook was penning a weekly column for the Daily Express with a large following.
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Jean Rook was renamed the First Bitch of Fleet Street, a title which she believed came from the actor Derek Nimmo.
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Jean Rook enjoyed her privileged position as a newspaper columnist, and dressed in extravagantly brassy style - clanking with chunky accessories - but she had the opinions and language to match 'the look' and was proud of her success in what was a male-dominated industry.
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Jean Rook interviewed scores of public figures, including Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Elizabeth Taylor and Barry Humphries, applying her "down-to-earth" approach in every interview.
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Jean Rook was an admirer of Thatcher's, later claiming to be the first journalist to have taken her seriously, and to predict she would be Britain's first female prime minister.
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Jean Rook interviewed Thatcher nine times from 1974 to 1989.
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Jean Rook is recalled for her blatant homophobia, and discrimination against and apparent dislike of lesbians.
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Jean Rook has been criticised for the harm she caused to the LGBT community at the end of the 1970s, both in the case of Maureen Colquhoun and in the 1978 case of lesbian mothers.
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Jean Rook married journalist Geoffrey Nash, whom she had met on the Sheffield Telegraph, on 3 July 1965.
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Jean Rook was highly professional, and addicted to work, but in her private life she was a warm-hearted Yorkshirewoman, devoted to her family.
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In 1989, Jean Rook was diagnosed with breast cancer, and shared her experiences with her readers as the disease progressed.
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Jean Rook died aged 59, on 5 September 1991, in the Nuffield Hospital, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent.