Sir David Paradine Frost OBE (7 April 1939 – 31 August 2013) was an English television host, journalist, comedian and writer.

Frost interviewed all eight British prime ministers serving from 1964 to 2016, from Alec Douglas-Home to David Cameron, and all eight American presidents in office from 1969 to 2008.

Frost died on 31 August 2013, aged 74, on board the cruise ship MS Queen Elizabeth, where he had been engaged as a speaker.

[4] David Paradine Frost was born in Tenterden, Kent, on 7 April 1939, the son of a Methodist minister of Huguenot descent,[1] the Rev.

Wilfred John Paradine Frost (1900–1967), and his wife, Maude Evelyn ("Mona"; 1903–1991), née Aldrich; he had two elder sisters.

[18] More sombrely, on 23 November 1963, a tribute to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, an event which had occurred the previous day, formed an entire edition of That Was the Week That Was.

Screened on three evenings each week, this series was dropped after a sketch was found to be offensive to Catholics and another to the British royal family.

A September 1968 meeting of the Network Programme Committee, which made decisions about the channel's scheduling, was particularly fraught, with Lew Grade expressing hatred of Frost in his presence.

Two of his guests on this programme were British historian A. J. P. Taylor and entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.[23] Around this time Frost interviewed Rupert Murdoch whose recently acquired Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, had just serialised the memoirs of Christine Keeler, a central figure in the Profumo scandal of 1963.

[24] Murdoch confessed to his biographer Michael Wolff that the incident had convinced him that Frost was "an arrogant bastard, [and] a bloody bugger".

[27] In a declassified transcript of a 1972 telephone call between Frost and Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security advisor and secretary of state, Frost urged Kissinger to call chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer and urge him to compete in that year's World Chess Championship.

[29] Frost interviewed heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali in 1974 at his training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania before "The Rumble in the Jungle" with George Foreman.

Ali remarked, "Listen David, when I meet this man, if you think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait till I whip Foreman's behind.

Nixon was paid $600,000 plus a share of the profits for the interviews, which had to be funded by Frost himself after the U.S. television networks turned down the programme, describing it as "checkbook journalism".

Frost's company negotiated its own deals to syndicate the interviews with local stations across the U.S. and internationally, creating what Ron Howard described as "the first fourth network".

Nixon, who had previously avoided discussing his role in the Watergate scandal that had led to his resignation as president in 1974, expressed contrition saying, "I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life".

"[40] Frost was one of the "Famous Five" who launched TV-am in February 1983; however, like LWT in the late 1960s, the station began with an unsustainable "highbrow" approach.

Frost had been part of an unsuccessful consortium, CPV-TV, with Richard Branson and other interests, which had attempted to acquire three ITV contractor franchises prior to the changes made by the Independent Television Commission in 1991.

[43][44] In 2007, Frost hosted a discussion with Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi as part of the Monitor Group's involvement in the country.

The play was adapted into a Hollywood motion picture entitled Frost/Nixon and starring Michael Sheen as Frost and Langella as Nixon, both reprising their stage roles.

It was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, winning none: Best Motion Picture-Drama, Best Director-Drama, Best Actor-Drama (Langella), Best Screenplay, and Best Original Score.

[46] It was also nominated for five Academy Awards, again winning none: Best Picture, Best Actor (Langella), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.

In the mid-1960s, he dated British actress Janette Scott, between her marriages to songwriter Jackie Rae and singer Mel Tormé; from 1970 to 1973, he was engaged to American actress Diahann Carroll; in 1974, he was briefly engaged to American model Karen Graham;[48] between 1972 and 1977 he had a relationship with British socialite Caroline Cushing; in 1981, he married Lynne Frederick, widow of Peter Sellers, but they divorced the following year.

[51] On 31 August 2013, Frost was aboard the Cunard cruise ship MS Queen Elizabeth when he died of a heart attack, aged 74.

"[58] Frost was the only person to have interviewed all eight British prime ministers serving between 1964 and 2016 (Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron) and all seven U.S. presidents in office between 1969 and 2009 (Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W.

[63] After having been in television for 40 years, Frost was estimated to be worth £200 million by the Sunday Times Rich List in 2006,[64] a figure he considered a significant overestimate in 2011.