TV journalist Barbara Walters passes away at 93

Washington [US], December 31 (ANI): Emmy award-winning journalist and celebrity interviewer, Barbara Walters, passed away aged 93.

According to Variety, a US-based news outlet, Walters conducted interviews with the most prominent figures across politics and entertainment, from Katherine Hepburn to Monica Lewinsky to Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat. She was the highest-paid television journalist at one time, earning as much as $12 million per year at ABC, where she worked from 1976 until her retirement from ABC News and from her popular show “The View” in May 2014. She put in 12 years at NBC’s “Today” show prior to that.

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 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 and 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.