Veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost has died from a heart attack at the age of age of 74.
He had been giving a speech aboard the cruise ship the Queen Elizabeth II on Saturday night.
The BBC reported a statement from his family said: ‘His family are devastated and ask for privacy at this difficult time.
Veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost has died of a heart attack at 74 Sir. Pictured with wife wife Carin
‘A family funeral will be held in the near future and details of a memorial service will be announced in due course.’
Sir David Frost, who probably interviewed more world figures from royalty, politics, the Church, show-business and virtually everywhere else, than any other living broadcaster, was the most illustrious TV inquisitor of his generation.
He not only won virtually all the major television awards available, but his professional activities were so diverse that he was once described as ‘a one-man conglomerate’.
His interview with the doomed American President ‘Tricky Dicky’ Richard Nixon in 1977 was a TV classic.
Mr Frost became famous after interviewing President Nixon. The politician was forced to admit that he had taken part in the infamous Watergate scandal
Former President Richard Nixon exhibited a range of expressions during his interview with David Frost
Frost quizzed the President on the Watergate Scandal that had emerged in the early 1970s .
An under pressure Nixon mistakenly said: ‘When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.’
Admitting he was part of the cover up, Nixon eventually conceded that he had let the American public down.
His dramatic interview with Richard Nixon was at the time the most widely watched news interview in the history of TV. It was shown in almost every televised nation in the world, and garnered the largest audience ever achieved for such an interview in the United States.
It was later dramatised into a sell-out West End play, and more recently a Hollywood movie.
It was a brilliant scoop. Sir David, whose career at that stage appeared to be on the decline, poured some of his own wealth into this interview. It was a gamble, but it totally restored his fortunes – and there was no looking back after that.
He is said to have been a ‘fearsome’ interviewer’. Pictured her with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
The 2008 historical drama Frost/Nixon, starring Michael Sheen, chronicled the run up to the Nixon interviews.
The film was a critical hit and was nominated for five Golden Globes and five Academy Awards.
Sir David was regularly scoffed at by fellow broadcasters for his allegedly non-aggressive style of questioning.
But he invariably had the last laugh because he almost always extracted more intriguing information and revealing reactions from his subjects than other far more acerbic broadcasters who boasted about their hard-hitting treatment of their ‘victims’.
Colleague Barney Jones, who edited his Breakfast with Frost programme, told the BBC: ‘David loved broadcasting, did it brilliantly for more than 50 years and was eagerly looking forward to a host of projects – including interviewing the prime minister next week – before his sudden and tragic death. We will all miss him enormously.’
Sir David Frost after receiving his knighthood with his wife and three sons
Television Presenter and Newscaster Sir David Frost with wife Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard at Ascot
Prime Minister David Cameron said: ‘My heart goes out to David Frost’s family. He could be – and certainly was with me – both a friend and a fearsome interviewer.’
Sir David first came to notice nationally with the Saturday night TV satirical programme That Was The Week That Was, which he hosted and co-created in the early 1960s. By today’s standards of merciless lampooning, it would appear tame.
It shocked authority, and was a programme not to be missed by those who were its victims as much as by those who enjoyed seeing the great and the good so savagely ridiculed.
A young Sir David Frost and Lance Percival on the set of the television show That Was The Week That Was
The Beatles’ George Harrison and John Lennon answer questions from David Frost on the television programme ‘The Frost Report’. They are discussing to topic of transcendental meditation and LSD
Tony Blair, Prime Minister appearing with Sir David Frost on the BBC current affairs television programme: ‘Breakfast with Frost’ in 2005
But it ‘made’ Sir David who was then seen as a coruscating rebel, although quite a likeable one, and who was to develop, ironically, as an Establishment figure in his own right.
David Paradine Frost was born on April 7, 1939, the son of a Methodist preacher, at Tenterden, Kent. He was educated at Gillingham Grammar School, Wellingborough Grammar School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
At Cambridge he joined Footlights, the renowned revue and cabaret society. He then started to do some TV for the regional station in Norwich, particularly a programme called Town and Gown which was about Cambridge.
David Frost with an early Bafta and with his Fellowship Award at the Pioneer British Academy Television Awards in 2005
For the Christmas edition of that programme in December 1959, the programme-makers decided they wanted a spoof of TV and they approached Footlights and asked Sir David and the comedian Peter Cook to write it.
Later Sir David said: ‘We went to the station to do it, and I walked into this rather odd environment of a television studio and I thought “This is home. This is for me”. It was an instant feeling, and from that moment on, for me the decision was made. It was a very memorable day.’
Another of his programmes, The Frost Report, effectively launched John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett on their subsequent glittering careers.
Sir David’s list of interviewees reads like a roll call of the world’s most famous and powerful people. They include virtually every US president and British prime minister during his working life.
Others included Prince Charles, the Duke and Duchess of York, the Princess Royal, Robert F Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Pierre Trudeau, Mikhail Gorbachev, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, King Hussein, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, and countless more.
He was the only person to have interviewed all six British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2007and the seven US presidents in office between 1969 and 2008.
Among his awards were two Emmy Awards (for The David Frost Show), the Royal Television Society Silver Medal and the Richard Dimbleby Award in the United Kingdom and internationally, the Golden Rose of Montreux.
Over the years, Sir David wrote 17 books, produced several films and started two television networks, London Weekend Television and TV-am.
In 1983, he married Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard, second daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. There were three sons.
He was awarded an OBE in 1970 and received his knighthood in 1993.
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