Fallaci, 76

One of the legendary names in journalism and a great political interviewer, Oriana Fallaci, has just died. She was 76.

She will be missed.

Veteran Journalist Oriana Fallaci Dies

Oriana Fallaci, a veteran journalist and author who challenged world leaders in uncompromising interviews and recently drew criticism for her vehement attacks on Islam, has died at 76, officials said Friday.

Fallaci, who was diagnosed with breast cancer years ago, died overnight in a private clinic in Florence, said Paolo Klun, an official with the RCS publishing group, which carried Fallaci's work. Klun said Fallaci, who lived in New York, had come back to her hometown days ago as her condition worsened.

Fallaci had publicly talked of her battle against cancer, calling the disease "the alien."

A Florence native and former Resistance fighter, Fallaci started her career in journalism as a teenager.

She worked for two decades with L'Europeo, a now defunct news weekly that used to be among Italy's more prominent. Her work was often translated and published in the world's most prestigious publications.

As a war correspondent, Fallaci traveled the world covering hotspots, including the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. In 1968, she was shot as she was covering an army massacre of student protesters in Mexico.

But it was her challenging interviews with world leaders that best defined her work and personality, including with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Fallaci's questioning was abrasive and provocative, her writing style impetuous.

"Fallaci's manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence," The New Yorker wrote in a profile on her this year entitled "The Agitator."

Read more here. Fallaci's photo taken from this site.