Barbara Walters was born in 1929 (although Walters herself has claimed 1931 in an on-camera interview) in Boston to Dena (née Seletsky) and Louis “Lou” Walters (born Louis Abraham Warmwater). Her parents were both Jewish, and descendants of refugees from the former Russian Empire. Walters’s paternal grandfather, Abraham Isaac Warmwater, was born in Łódź, Poland, and emigrated to the United Kingdom, changing his name to Abraham Walters (the original family surname was Waremwasser). Walters’s father, Lou, was born in London c. 1896 and moved to New York with his father and two brothers, arriving August 28, 1909. His mother and four sisters arrived in 1910. During her childhood her father managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. This club was owned in partnership with E.M. Loew and initially located in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1949, her father opened the New York version of the Latin Quarter. He also worked as a Broadway producer where he produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943. He also was the Entertainment Director for the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he imported the “Folies Bergère” stage show from Paris to the resort’s main showroom. Walters’s brother, Burton, died in 1944 of pneumonia. Walters’s elder sister, Jacqueline, was born mentally disabled and died of ovarian cancer in 1985.

Walters attended Lawrence School, a public school in Brookline, Massachusetts, to the middle of fifth grade, when her father moved the family to Miami Beach in 1939, where she also attended public school. After her father moved the family to New York City, she went to eighth grade at Ethical Culture Fieldston School, after which the family moved back to Miami Beach. Then, she went back to New York City, where she attended Birch Wathen School from which she graduated in 1947. In 1951 she received a B.A. in English from Sarah Lawrence College and immediately looked for work in New York City. After about a year at a small advertising agency, she began working at the NBC network affiliate in New York City, WNBT-TV (now WNBC), doing publicity and writing press releases. She began producing a 15-minute children’s program, Ask the Camera, directed by Roone Arledge in 1953. She began producing for TV host Igor Cassini (Cholly Knickerbocker). However, she left the network after her boss pressured her to marry him and engaged in a fist-fight with a man she preferred to date. Then she went to WPIX to produce the Eloise McElhone Show; it was canceled in 1954. She became a writer on The Morning Show at CBS in 1955.

Walters has been married four times to three different men. Her first husband was Robert Henry Katz, a business executive and former Navy lieutenant. They married on June 20, 1955, at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. The marriage was reportedly annulled after 11 months, or in 1957.

After a few years as a publicist with Tex McCrary Inc. and a job as a writer at Redbook magazine, Walters joined NBC’s The Today Show as a writer and researcher in 1961. She moved up to become that show’s regular “Today Girl,” handling lighter assignments and the weather. In her autobiography, she describes this era before the Women’s Movement as a time when it was believed that nobody would take a woman seriously reporting “hard news.” Previous “Today Girls” (whom Walters called “tea pourers”) included Florence Henderson, Helen O’Connell, Estelle Parsons and Lee Meriwether. Within a year, she had become a reporter-at-large developing, writing, and editing her own reports and interviews. One very well received film segment was “A Day in the Life of a Novice Nun,” edited by then-first assistant film editor Donald Swerdlow (now Don Canaan), who was subsequently promoted to become a full film editor at NBC News. She had a great relationship with host Hugh Downs for years. When Frank McGee was named host, he refused to do joint interviews with Walters unless he was given the first three questions. She was not named co-host of the show until McGee’s death in 1974 when NBC officially designated Walters as the program’s first female co-host. Beginning in 1971, she also hosted her own local NBC affiliate show, Not for Women Only, which ran in the mornings after The Today Show.

Her second husband was Lee Guber, theatrical producer and theater owner. They married on December 8, 1963, and divorced in 1976. They have one daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber (born 1968, adopted the same year).

In the late 1960s, Walters wrote a magazine article, “How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything”, which drew upon the kinds of things people said to her, which were often mistakes. Shortly after the article appeared, she received a letter from Doubleday expressing interest in expanding it into a book. Walters felt that it would help “tongue-tied, socially awkward people—the many people who worry that they can’t think of the right thing to say to start a conversation.” She published the book How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything in 1970, with the assistance of ghostwriter June Callwood. To Walters’s great surprise, the book was a success. As of 2008, it had gone through eight printings, sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, and had been translated into at least six languages.

Walters is known for “personality journalism” and her “scoop” interviews. In November 1977, she achieved a joint interview with Egypt’s president, Anwar Al Sadat, and Israel’s Prime Minister, Menachem Begin. According to The New York Times, when she went mano a mano with Walter Cronkite to interview both world leaders, at the end of Cronkite’s interview, he is clearly heard saying: “Did Barbara get anything I didn’t get?” Her interviews with world leaders from all walks of life are a chronicle of the latter part of the 20th century. They include the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, the Empress Farah Pahlavi; Russia’s Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin; China’s Jiang Zemin; the UK’s Margaret Thatcher; Cuba’s Fidel Castro, as well as India’s Indira Gandhi, Czechoslovakia’s Václav Havel, Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, King Hussein of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, among many others. Other interviews with influential people include pop icon Michael Jackson, actress Katharine Hepburn, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and in 1980 Sir Laurence Olivier. Walters considered Robert Smithdas, a deaf-blind man who spent his life improving the lives of other individuals who are deaf-blind, as her most inspirational interview.

Her television special about Cuban leader Fidel Castro aired on ABC-TV on June 9, 1977. Although the footage of her two days of interviewing Castro in Cuba showed his personality, in part, as freewheeling, charming, and humorous, she pointedly said to him, “You allow no dissent. Your newspapers, radio, television, motions picture are under state control.” To this, he replied, “Barbara, our concept of freedom of the press is not yours. If you asked us if a newspaper could appear here against socialism, I can say honestly no, it cannot appear. It would not be allowed by the party, the government, or the people. In that sense we do not have the freedom of the press that you possess in the U.S. And we are very satisfied about that.” She concluded the broadcast of the interview by remarking, “What we disagreed on most profoundly is the meaning of freedom—and that is what truly separates us.” At the time, Walters kept quiet about seeing New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, pitcher Whitey Ford, and several coaches in Cuba, there to assist Cuban ballplayers.

Walters is also known for her years on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 where she reunited with former Today Show host Hugh Downs in 1979. Throughout her career at ABC, Walters has appeared on ABC news specials as a commentator, including presidential inaugurations and the coverage of 9/11. She was also chosen to be the moderator for the third and final debate between candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, held on the campus of the College of William and Mary at Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall in Williamsburg, Virginia, during the 1976 presidential election. In 1984, she moderated a Presidential debate held at the Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

Walters has seldom minced words when describing the visible, on-the-air disdain her co-anchor Harry Reasoner displayed for her when she was teamed up with him on the ABC Evening News from 1976 to 1978. Reasoner had a difficult relationship with Walters, because he disliked having a co-anchor, even though he worked with former CBS colleague Howard K. Smith nightly on ABC for several years. In 1981, five years after the start of their short-lived ABC partnership and well after Reasoner returned to CBS News, Walters and her former co-anchor had a memorable (and cordial) 20/20 interview on the occasion of Reasoner’s new book release.

Her third husband was Merv Adelson, the CEO of Lorimar Television. They married in 1981 and divorced in 1984. They remarried in 1986 and divorced for the second time in 1992.

Barbara Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989. On June 15, 2007, Walters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has won Daytime and Prime Time Emmy Awards, a Women in Film Lucy Award, and a GLAAD Excellence in Media award. Her impact on popular culture is illustrated by Gilda Radner’s “Baba Wawa” impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live, featuring her idiosyncratic speech with its rounded “R”. Her name also appeared in the January 23, 1995 New York Times Monday Crossword Puzzle. In 2008, she was honored with the Disney Legends award, given to those who made an outstanding contribution to The Walt Disney Company, which owns the network ABC. That same year, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Women’s Agenda. On September 21, 2009, Walters was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 30th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards at New York City’s Lincoln Center.

Walters was a co-host of the daytime talk show The View, of which she also is co-creator and co-executive producer with her business partner, Bill Geddie. It premiered on August 11, 1997.

On March 3, 1999, her interview of Monica Lewinsky was seen by a record 74 million viewers, the highest rating ever for a news program. Walters asked Lewinsky, “What will you tell your children when you have them?” Lewinsky replied, “Mommy made a big mistake,” at which point Walters brought the program to a dramatic conclusion, turning to the viewers and saying, “And that is the understatement of the year.”

Walters described the show in its original opening credits as a forum for women of “different generations, backgrounds, and views.” She added, “Be careful what you wish for…” on the opening credits of its second season. Through The View, she was able to clinch two Daytime Emmy Awards for Best Talk Show in 2003 and Best Talk Show Host (with longtime host Joy Behar, moderator Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and Sherri Shepherd) in 2009.

Since leaving her role as 20/20 co-host in 2004, Walters remained as a part-time contributor of special programming and interviews for ABC News until 2016.

In Walters’s autobiography Audition, she claimed that she had an affair in the 1970s with Edward Brooke, then a married United States Senator from Massachusetts. It is not clear whether Walters also was married at the time. Walters said they ended the affair to protect their careers from scandal. In 2007 she dated Pulitzer Prize-winning gerontologist Robert Neil Butler.

She published her autobiography, Audition: A Memoir, in 2008.

On March 7, 2010, Barbara Walters announced she would no longer hold Oscar interviews, but will still be working with ABC and on The View.

In May 2010, Walters said she would be having open heart surgery to replace a faulty aortic valve. She had known for quite a while that she was suffering from aortic valve stenosis, even though she was symptom-free. The procedure to fix the faulty heart valve “went well, and the doctors are very pleased with the outcome,” Walters’s spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, said four days later.

On July 9, 2010, it was announced that Walters would return to The View and her Sirius XM satellite show, Here’s Barbara, in September 2010.

On March 28, 2013, numerous media outlets reported that Barbara Walters would retire in May 2014 and that she would make the announcement on the show four days later. However, on the April 1 episode, Walters neither confirmed nor denied the retirement rumors; she said “if and when I might have an announcement to make, I will do it on this program, I promise, and the paparazzi guys — you will be the last to know”. Walters confirmed six weeks later that she would be retiring from television hosting and interviewing in May 2014, as originally reported; she made the official announcement on the May 13, 2013, episode of The View while also announcing that she will continue as the show’s executive producer for as long as it’s on the air.

Walters retired from being a co-host on May 15, 2014. Although retired, Walters returned as a guest co-host on an intermittent basis throughout 2014 and 2015.

On June 10, 2014, it was announced that she would be ‘coming out of retirement’ in order to do a special 20/20 interview with Peter Rodger, the father of Elliot Rodger who had committed the 2014 Isla Vista killings.

Walters continued to host her 10 Most Fascinating People series in 2014 and 2015.

In 2014, Walters said she regretted not having more children.

In 2015, Walters hosted the documentary series American Scandals on Investigation Discovery.

Her final on-air interview was of presidential candidate Donald Trump for ABC News in December 2015.

Walters is close friends with Tom Brokaw and Woody Allen, and was close friends with Joan Rivers as well with former Fox News head Roger Ailes from the late 1960s until his death in 2017.