Barbara Walters^†

The $1 million offer from ABC in 1976 was the most talked-about deal in broadcast news. It made her the first woman to co-anchor a network evening newscast, alongside Harry Reasoner, who spent two years making his contempt visible on camera. The ratings collapsed. ABC's fix was to move her to prime-time interview specials, where it turned out she was far better suited. Her first featured President-elect Jimmy Carter and Barbra Streisand. She spent the next three decades getting people to tell her things they hadn't told anyone else.

She created The View in 1997 as an all-female panel roundtable, which she called the 'dessert' of her career. It outlasted everything else she built. Her reputation took visible dents: she defended Woody Allen against his daughter's abuse allegations and cut off Corey Feldman on air when he tried to name Hollywood predators. She broke through in an industry that didn't want her there, then spent the next decade remaking daytime in her own image.

Her father, Lou Walters, ran the Latin Quarter nightclub chain. She grew up backstage around showgirls and headliners, and wrote in her 2008 memoir that it taught her not to be in awe of famous people. Gilda Radner's 'Baba Wawa' SNL parody embarrassed her publicly, targeting a speech anomaly she'd worked to downplay. She adopted a daughter in 1968 after three miscarriages, and put all of it in her memoir Audition, which surprised people who'd assumed she didn't have that kind of candor.

ABC aired Our Barbara, a one-hour special, on January 1, 2023. The View devoted its first show of the new year to her, reuniting several former co-hosts. Oprah Winfrey wrote on Instagram: 'Without Barbara Walters there wouldn't have been me nor any other woman you see on evening, morning, and daily news.' Walters was buried at Lakeside Memorial Park in Doral, Florida, next to her sister and parents.