Women may not yet have smashed the glass ceiling but they seem to have finally conquered the TV screen.

However, decades before newsrooms finally became female-friendly, Barbara Walters, who has died aged 93, used her own inimitable combination of graft and glitz to chip away at ingrained prejudice.

When she started at the NBC network in 1961, she was the only female. Being also blonde and pretty, at first she wasn’t treated seriously, but she didn’t give up and in 1964 became a regular member of the Today show, developing, writing and editing her own reports.

Her colleagues didn’t make it easy for her: Frank McGee, Today’s host from 1971, would only do joint interviews with her on condition he could ask the first three questions. It would take another ten years for Walters to finally succeed in co-anchoring an evening news show.

She became the first female to do so and was dubbed the “million-dollar baby”, thanks to the $5 million, five-year contract she received for it.

Barbara Walter was born in Boston, the second daughter of Lou Walters, a booking agent and nightclub impresario, and Dena Seletsky, who worked in a men’s clothing store. The couple’s older daughter, Jacqueline, was mentally disabled.

Both Lou and Dena were the children of east European immigrants who had fled antisemitism. Lou was born in London and moved to New York with his father and brothers at the age of 11 but maintained his English accent, which gave him a certain allure.

Lou’s fortunes rose and fell dramatically. One moment it was Broadway first nights, trips to Europe and Central Park West penthouses, next the tax collector was knocking at the door and house, car and furniture were repossessed.

As a result, Walters’s youth was anything but boring, her education a mix of private (when Lou was flush) and public schools (when he was broke) in both New York City and Miami Beach. In 1951 she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, with a BA in English.

Walters’ priority now was to earn some money as her father was down on his luck again and it was up to her to support her parents and her sister.

Her first job was as a secretary at a PR firm, followed by the CBS publicity department, the network’s morning show and in 1961, Today. The Walters star had started its meteoric rise. In 1984 she became a co-host on the ABC news magazine 20/20, a position she held until 2004. She also created, produced and co-hosted The View, a daytime talk show from 1997 to 2014.

Her rise marked a shift in the role of the TV anchor — who until then had been just a news journalist — and ushered in the era of the celebrity anchor. Walters didn’t merely mix with the rich and famous, she became one of them.

During her “Barbara Walters Specials” she would ask her guests — actors, top politicians and the like — the sort of intimate, even intrusive questions nobody else had dared ask before.

And she got her answers. Walters loved the spotlight, revelled in it: she didn’t just interview Fidel Castro, she went across the Bay of Pigs in a patrol boat with him; she danced the mambo with actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, asked Monica Lewinsky why she kept the (infamous ) blue dress from her encounter with Bill Clinton.

She interviewed all the big names of the time, from Michael Jackson and Katharine Hepburn to the Shah of Iran and Princess Grace of Monaco, including all the American presidents (and the first ladies) from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama as well as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and even Vladimir Putin.

It wasn’t until 1973, when she went there to interview Prime Minister Golda Meir, that Walters first visited Israel. In her memoir, Audition (2008), she reveals that until that time she had never felt a particular interest in the country: her parents, she explained, were not at all religious and never set foot in the synagogue or celebrated the holidays, although her mother did light Shabbat candles on Friday night.

But that first visit to Israel was a game changer: Walters recalled feeling overwhelmed, experiencing “quite a strong connection”.

During her visit she met Moshe Dayan, then the Israel Defence Minister,whom she described as a “dashing and heroic figure” and “very good-looking”.

A few years later, in 1977, Walters memorably went back to Israel when she managed to bag a first: a joint interview with Anwar el-Sadat, the Egyptian president, and the prime minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.

She described Sadat’s arrival on Jewish soil as “one of the most glorious days I have ever experienced”. That ground-breaking interview also cemented her status as a “real” journalist.

But those who knew Walters had known that all along: her perfectionism and her drive were as legendary as her social connections and her research skills were second to none.

From 1981 Walters presented an Oscar-night special but stepped down in 2010 because everybody was now doing celebrity interviews and, she found the nature of celebrity had changed, and not to her liking. Often, she explained, a celebrity was just someone who has come out of rehab: it just wasn’t interesting enough for her.

A trailblazer who normalised women fronting TV programmes and introduced a more confessional type of interview, Walters received a number of Emmy awards, was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989 and in 2007 received a star on the Hollywood Hall of Fame.

She was married four times to three different men: her first husband was business executive Robert Katz: they married in 1951 and divorced in 1957. She married theatrical producer Lee Guber in 1963 and divorced in 1976.

During that time, after Walters’ three miscarriages, they adopted a baby girl, Jacqueline Dena Guber, in 1968. In 1981 Walters married Merv Adelson, the CEO of Lorimar Television; they divorced in 1984, remarried in 1986 and divorced again in 1992. Walters is survived by her daughter.

Barbara Walters: born September 25, 1929. Died December 30, 2022