‘Bigger Than Life’: Trailblazing Barbara Walters Dies at 93

News icon Barbara Walters has died at the age of 93.

The news network that Walters called home for many years, ABC News, announced her death late Friday, paying tribute to the “dominant force in an industry once dominated by men.”

“Barbara Walters passed away peacefully in her home surrounded by loved ones. She lived her life with no regrets. She was a trailblazer not only for female journalists, but for all women,” her publicist, Cindi Berger, said in a statement.

Bill Geddie, Walters’ longtime executive producer on The View, the woman-centered daytime talk show she launched, told The Daily Beast that he “assumed Barbara Walters would live forever.”

“That’s how I saw her. Bigger than life. A trailblazer for women, sure. But when she retired she was doing live television five days a week in her mid-80s. Maybe she’s also a trailblazer for seniors,” he added. “For me, she was my mentor and friend. We made great television for 27 years. What a ride.”

Tributes immediately began pouring in on social media for the veteran newswoman, who became the first female news anchor on an evening news program, and went on to become one of the best-known faces in the news in a career spanning five decades.

“We were all influenced by Barbara Walters,” ABC News’ David Muir said of the “extraordinary human being, journalist, pioneer, legend.”

“She broke barriers behind the scenes and she broke news on-camera. She got people to say things they never would’ve said to another journalist,” Muir said.

Walters got her start in the 1950s as a writer for CBS’ The Morning Show, and went on to become the first female co-host of NBC’s Today in 1974.

After joining ABC News in 1976 for the evening news, and later becoming co-host of 20/20, Walters became known for some of the most-talked about interviews with celebrities and politicians. She sat down with Richard Nixon and his wife, plus Monica Lewinsky, Fidel Castro, and the Shah of Iran, to name just a few.

Walters was known for asking her subjects tough questions in her interviews, and sometimes questions that would lead to tears.

“I asked Vladimir Putin if he ever ordered anyone to be killed,” she once said of her sit-down with the Russian president. “For the record, he said ‘no.’”

But she revealed more about her own personal life in her 2008 memoir Audition.

Of her career in TV news, she said: “No one was more surprised than I. I wasn’t beautiful, like many of the women on the program before me, [and] I had trouble pronouncing my r’s.”

With her launch of The View in 1997, she was credited with creating a space for women from all walks of life to provide their perspectives on the most pressing issues of the day. During her last appearance on the show in 2014, she said she was ready to step back and watch from the sidelines.

“I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain. I want instead to sit on a sunny field and admire the very gifted women—and OK, some men too—who will be taking my place,” she said.

In a December 2010 essay for Vanity Fair, Walters revealed that she’d undergone open heart surgery and come away with it with a new lease on life.

Less than two months after the operation, and still not fully recovered, she said, she went back to work on The View months ahead of schedule.

“Barack Obama decided to appear on the program—the first time ever for a sitting president to be on a daytime talk show. How could I not be on it? So, on July 28, I took my place onstage with my colleagues and led off the interview with the president of the United States,” she wrote.

The surgery, she wrote, “had to have some meaning for me. I decided that with my new heart it was time for a new attitude, time to do things I had wanted to do for years and not continue doing things I had no serious interest in. No more big dinners just to prove I was invited. No more opera. Ditto for Shakespeare. No more splashy charity events. Send a check instead. The new and happier me.”

Throughout her career, Walters was not without her controversies, and perhaps as a measure of her success, she found herself impersonated by comics on Saturday Night Live.

She was also mocked for a 1981 interview with Katharine Hepburn in which she asked the actress what kind of tree she’d like to be. Decades later, Walters explained that her question came in response to Hepburn comparing herself to a tree.

“But no one remembers that,” she said in a 2008 interview with USA Today.

Asked in that same interview how she’d like to be remembered, Walters said: “On a personal level, as a loving mother. On a professional level, I don’t want to be remembered for asking Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she’d like to be, which I didn’t do. Or as an interviewer who made people cry—which I don’t do anymore—but as a good journalist.”

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