Barbara Walters Biography

Legendary American broadcast journalist Barbara Walters was born in 1929 in New York. Barbara’s father was a businessman and entrepreneur who had several ups and downs in entertainment business investments, including casinos, and night clubs. Walters’s businesses brought young Barbara very close to the entertainment industry, and she recalls as a young girl being in “awe” of the many celebrities who she encountered through his establishments.

After a series of failed investments, Barbara and her family moved back and forth from Miami Beach to New York City, with Barbara ultimately graduating from Birch Wathen School in NYC in 1947. Following high school, Barbara graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951 with a B.A. in English, and she returned to New York to begin work at a local NBC news affiliate, writing press releases and working in their publicity department. After a few years, Walters moved into producing, and then in 1955 she began working as a writer for the CBS Morning Show.

By 1962, Barbara was writing and producing various stories of interest to women for The Today Show on NBC. Her talent for interviewing and her warm on-camera personality became evident over the years, and so by the early 1970’s she was tapped for the role of co-host on the network. The gig became Walters’s foray into her legendary career as one of the world’s most recognizable and successful on-air personalities, a career which has lasted well into the new millennium.

Throughout the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, Barbara Walters anchored for the ABC Evening News; the ABC newsmagazine 20/20; the The View (also for the ABC network.) Her television “specials,” in which she interviews various celebrity figures, have become legendary for their poignant revelations of some of the era’s most cherished and sometimes notorious public figures. She has been recognized with dozens of awards, including multiple Emmy Awards, Women in Film Awards, and NAACP Image Awards.

Barbara Walters’s most recent consistent role has been as host of the ABC program The View, which she joined in the mid 1990’s and hosted until she recently announced her retirement in 2015. Walters continues to appear in her special reports for 20/20, and occasionally on her own television specials.