David Frost, 1939–2013

David Frost had a talent for extracting the truth. During his 1977 series of TV interviews with Richard Nixon, the unflappable British presenter spent days slowly charming his guest toward a confession. The former president, who had left office three years earlier in the wake of Watergate, had acknowledged mistakes, but Frost urged him to admit his systematic abuse of power. “Unless you say it,” Frost said, “you’re going to be haunted for the rest of your life.” The interviewer later said he hadn’t prepared that comment. “That was totally off-the-cuff,” said Frost. “I just knew at that moment that Richard Nixon was more vulnerable than he’d ever be in his life.” After more pressing, Nixon caved. “I let the American people down,” he said, “and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

Born in southern England to a Methodist minister and his wife, Frost was a young Cambridge University graduate when a BBC director saw him performing a political comedy routine in a nightclub, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The director “decided that Frost was exactly the man to bring satire to the late night mass television audience,” and in 1962 Frost was hired as the host of the news-lampooning That Was the Week That Was. The following year, he brought the program to the U.S., paving the way for the hard-edged topical comedy of later shows like The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Daily Show.

“But Frost, still in his 20s, had bigger dreams,” said The Guardian (U.K.). He launched a serious talk show in the U.K., The Frost Programme, which changed the nature of the TV interview: “Unctuous deference was out; aggression and skepticism were in.” Frost was soon being courted by U.S. networks, and filled in twice for Johnny Carson in 1968. The following year he was given his own syndicated talk show, which ran until 1972, and he jetted constantly between the U.K. and the U.S., interviewing celebrities as varied as Timothy Leary, Billy Graham, and Raquel Welch.

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His greatest coup was persuading Nixon to sit with him—in return for a $600,000 fee and a share of the broadcast profits—for his first interview since resigning in disgrace in 1974. Nearly 29 hours of taped conversation was distilled into four 90-minute programs, the first of which drew a record 45 million viewers. “The interviews formed the basis of an acclaimed play and movie whose title—Frost/Nixon (not Nixon/Frost)—established that Frost had become as much of a celebrity as the VIPs he interviewed,” said The Washington Post.

Later in life, critics accused Frost of going “soft” on powerful interviewees and of joining the establishment he had once mocked, said the Los Angeles Times. He dismissed such claims, noting last year that a British politician had once told him, “David, you have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences.” That was the quote, Frost said, that he wanted etched on his tombstone.