Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, Dan Rather, and More Celebrate the Life and Legacy of Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters, the legendary newswoman known for her work on the Today show, 20/20, The View, and as a longtime correspondent for ABC News, died at her home in New York on Friday, according to reports. She was 93 years old.

“She lived her life with no regrets,” Walters’s publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement. “She was a trailblazer not only for female journalists, but for all women.” Walters is survived by a daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber.

Over the course of a career that began in the early 1960s, Walters—who broke new ground in broadcast journalism as both the first female co-host of Today and the first female co-anchor of a network evening news program—earned a reputation as a tenacious and enthralling interviewer, landing coveted conversations with political leaders (Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Indira Gandhi), A-list celebrities (Katharine Hepburn, Clint Eastwood, Barbra Streisand, Mariah Carey, Angelina Jolie), and objects of pop-cultural fascination (Monica Lewinsky, V. Stiviano) alike. In the rare sit-downs that she granted herself, Walters attributed her facility with big personalities to being the daughter of a nightclub owner: Waiting backstage in venues across Boston, Miami, and New York, she understood early that “behind these fantasy figures were real people.”

The female anchors and journalists who followed in Walters’s footsteps and considered her a mentor are legion. “Barbara gave us an arena, made it possible to cover every kind of story, to be brainy and girly,” Leslie Stahl has said. “She has an authenticity that allows her to present a complete human being on TV, who can flirt and laugh and be tough.”

“She was an early ballbuster, and I mean that in the nicest possible way,” noted Katie Couric in 2014, after Walters announced her retirement. “She rattled a lot of cages before women were even allowed into the zoo.”

“Without Barbara Walters there wouldn’t have been me—nor any other woman you see on evening, morning, and daily news,” Oprah Winfrey wrote in an Instagram post on Friday. “I did my very first television audition with her in mind the whole time.”

Although she resisted reflecting publicly on her legacy, insisting to Vanity Fair that she did not “sit down and see myself,” in 2008, Walters considered the reach of her achievement on television with pride—and no small amount of gratitude. “If there is any lesson . . . I don’t believe that the best is yet to come, and I don’t know why at this point in my life, at my oldest, I am more content than I have ever been,” she told Vogue. “If that gives anybody hope—I don’t feel depressed, even though I know that my working life is going to be less and that probably my greatest work is behind me. I am very happy. I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.”