Dame Esther Rantzen, who has died at the age of 86, was best known for presenting the BBC TV programme That's Life!
Over two decades, what started as a consumer programme with quirky asides became renowned for its high-profile campaigns, notably against child abuse.
It resulted in Dame Esther setting up Childline, a national telephone helpline for children suffering abuse or neglect.
She later became a renowned campaigner for older people and, in the last years of her life, for the legalisation of medically-assisted death.
Esther Louise Rantzen was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire on 22 June 1940. Her paternal ancestors were Polish Jews.
Her father, Henry, who worked as a broadcast engineer for the BBC, had moved the family out of London to escape German bombing.
The family returned to London when the war ended. She later recalled she hated the grey streets of the capital after the semi-rural idyll in which she had spent her early childhood.
After a spell at a private school, run by what she recalled was a sadistic headmistress, she went to the North London Collegiate School in Edgware, and then to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English.
The final That's Life! was broadcast on 19 June 1994 and featured a look back at both the highlights of the programme and Rantzen's own campaigning.
Possibly the most important and lasting result of any That's Life! campaign was the setting up of Childline in 1986. It followed a number of incidents, featured on the programme, including one in which a toddler had starved to death, locked in a bedroom.
Rantzen persuaded the BBC after the programme was transmitted that a helpline should be set up so that children suffering abuse or neglect could call in confidence. In the 48 hours it was open, it was inundated with calls.
This led to Rantzen campaigning for a 24/7 service to be set up. Childcare professionals claimed it would be impossible but she managed both to raise the money and persuade BT to provide premises and a free phone line.
By the time Childline merged with the NSPCC in 2006, it had 12 centres in the UK and the idea was quickly copied in many countries abroad.
Rantzen also went on to make an appearance on the ITV show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here in 2008.
She wrote a number of regular columns for newspapers and magazines and also involved herself with more than 50 charities.
Following the MPs' expenses scandal in 2009, Rantzen announced she would stand for parliament in Luton South.
She pitched herself against the sitting Labour MP, Margaret Moran, who had claimed expenses in excess of £23,000 for her second home in Southampton.
Moran stood down two days later but Rantzen fought the seat in the 2010 General Election, coming fourth with just over 4% of the vote.
Rantzen was made an OBE in 1991 and CBE in 2006. In the 2015 New Year Honours list, she was appointed a Dame Commander in recognition of the two helpline services she set up.
The following year she warned of the social media pressure on children in the digital world, urging families to "be aware" of the issue.
Speaking on Desert Island Discs in 2019, Dame Esther told presenter Lauren Laverne that her own broadcasting career would not be as successful if she had joined the industry now as a young woman, because she would not be "pretty enough".
In December 2023, Dame Esther said that she was taking a "miracle" treatment for her lung cancer, adding that she might "buzz off to Zurich" - where assisted dying is legal - if it did not work.
A year later, she witnessed the House of Commons vote in favour of the first stage of a Bill that might make a medically-assisted death legal in England and Wales. A similar bill was introduced to the Scottish Parliament.
Although Dame Esther knew that she would not live long enough to take advantage of any new law, she said she wanted to protect other families from "the same agonising experience".
"In the olden days, doctors would ease you out of life and the difference was it wasn't necessarily with your consent," she said.
In March 2025, her daughter confirmed that the drug that had kept Dame Esther alive since her cancer diagnosis was no longer working. They had always known that its effects would be temporary.
Last December, she told a newspaper that she was planning "an 'official' Christmas with my children and five grandchildren, slightly ahead of the real Christmas so that there will be more chance that I am actually alive to enjoy it with them!"
In September 2026, the House of Commons voted against the Assisted Dying Bill, a decision Dame Esther described as "a tragic day".
She added that she was now too frail to travel to Switzerland to end her life.
"Everything I didn't want to happen I'm having to go through now," she said, "which means that the people I love and care about either cannot visit me, or when they do, see me suffering pain or indignity which will inevitably get between them and our shared happy memories, and may even overwhelm the way they think of me."
The broadcaster and campaigner was once asked about what drove her to get involved in a multitude of causes.
"I need to be needed," she said. "It's what makes you get up in the morning, and makes you feel when you go to bed that the day has been well spent.
"There's a real pleasure in feeling somebody needs your help and that you actually have made a difference."
