Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything review – a fascinating exposé with one glaring omission ★★★★

Barbara Walters pictured with Richard Nixon. (Photo: Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum)[Missing Credit]

Her shtick was asking tough questions in a demure tone, and she also excelled at humanising larger-than-life figures by probing them about their domestic lives past and present. Or, in the case of Putin, by asking outright the question everyone else was too afraid to pose: “Did you ever order anyone killed?”

Her predilection for the personal attracted the ire of her male industry colleagues into whose fraternity she was never accepted. They also scoffed at her for interviewing movie stars and singers. 

“What made her different from other interviewers was she always found a way in,” says Bette Midler, whom Walters interviewed in 1980.

Walters’ parents were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. Thanks to her father, who ran night clubs where actors and dancers performed, she learned early on that celebrities were were not gods but mortals with chinks in their armour.

Barbara Walters talks with Muammar el- Quaddafi from his tent in Libya for "20/20" in 1989. (Photo: ABC News Studios)©ABC NEWS

When she was in her 20s, her father’s showbiz enterprise failed and Walters took on the role of breadwinner for her mother and disabled older sister. In 1961, she joined NBC’s Today Show mainly to cover “women’s stories”, the first of many gendered boxes into which she was expected to submissively fold herself.

In 1974, she become the first female co-host of the Today Show  and, two years later, the country’s first female network news anchor of the ABC Evening News. In both posts she faced prejudice from her male co-anchors and the largely male production teams.

She is perhaps best known role as the co-host of “​​​​​​The View, a talk show she created in 1997 to bring women of different generations and backgrounds to mainstream TV. In it, she drove home her career-spanning belief that the personal and political are forever enmeshed, and mixing gossipy humour and topical debates to great success.

Oprah Winfrey, whose recollections feature in the documentary alongside those of Andy Cohen, Cynthia McFadden and Connie Chung, says she modelled much of her interviewing style on Walters’. 

At one point in documentary, Winfrey admits that seeing Walters’ estrangement from her adopted daughter, Jacqueline, ruined it seems because of Walters’ unyielding prioritisation of her career, confirmed for Winfrey that she didn’t want a child of her own.

NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 05: Barbara Walters poses in the lobby during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2007 February 5, 2007 in New York City. (Photo by Katy Winn/Getty Images for IMG) Getty Images

This is a crisp, fascinating and multi-faceted portrait of Walters, which even explores her odd obsession with “blonde goddess” journalist Diane Sawyer, whose perfection in Walters’ eyes revealed the chasm of her own insecurities. Was being Jewish one of them?

We simply don’t know, for the documentary neglects entirely to mention her Jewish heritage. It is the programme’s only real sin of omission, but it is a big one.

​Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything streams on Disney+ from 23 June