My greatest moment: My interviews with Richard Nixon, said David Frost
David Frost, Britain's best-known broadcaster, who has died from a heart attack at the age of 74, believed the crowning achievement of his career was his series of interviews with former President Richard Nixon.
His death, which was announced in a statement by the Frost family to the BBC, was confirmed by a spokesman for Al Jazeera, where Frost hosted an interview programme.
His death on Saturday night came aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship, where he was scheduled to give a speech, the family said.
Cunard said the ship left Southampton on Saturday for a 10-day cruise in the Mediterranean.
Known in Britain for his early TV satire show That was The Week That Was and worldwide for the Frost-Nixon interview, Frost was known for incisive interviews of leading public figures,. Frost spent more than 50 years as a television star.
Mr. Frost’s family said a private funeral would be followed by a memorial service. Details about the memorial will be announced “in due course,” this family said in he statement said.
Since 2006, Frost has conducted newsmaker interviews for Al Jazeera English, one of the BBC’s main competitors overseas.
Among his guests on Al Jazeera were President George H.W. Bush, George Clooney and the tennis star Martina Navratilova. One of his first interviews for Al Jazeera made headlines when his guest Tony Blair agreed with Frost’s assessment that the Iraq war had, up until that point in 2006, “been pretty much of a disaster.”
A new season of Frost’s programme, “The Frost Interview,” began in July with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
Frost's big interviews with o former President Nixon came in 1977.
In the interviews, which later became a play and a film both named “Frost/Nixon,” Frost asked about Mr. Nixon’s abuses of presidential power, prompting this answer: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
“Upon hearing that sentence, I could scarcely believe my ears,” Frost wrote in a 2009 book about the interview, published on the occasion of the “Frost/Nixon” movie. Frost said his task then “was to keep him talking on this theme for as long as possible.”
Frost and Nixon continued to speak: Nixon was paid $600,000 for the interviews and a share of the profit for the broadcasts. The interviews ram for nearly 29 hours, and were taped over four weeks for about two hours at a time.
On the last day, Nixon apologised for putting “the American people through two years of needless agony.”
Whenever Frost was a asked about the highlight of his career, he said. " the Nixon interview".
“The Nixon interviews were among the great broadcast moments, but there were many other brilliant interviews,” Mr. Cameron said in a statement on Sunday morning.