David Frost Biography

Sir David Paladine Frost was a British TV host and producer who is best known in America for his 1977 interviews with disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon.

David Frost got his start in the early 1960s, when he emceed the satiric show That Was The Week That Was. That show and a follow-up, The Frost Report, served as a launch pad for many modern British comics (including most of the cast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) and propelled Frost himself into the limelight.

By the end of the 1960s he was producing shows in England and the U.S., and enjoying as much celebrity as the people he was interviewing on TV.

During the 1970s and ’80s he became known as a high-profile interviewer, thanks in large part to a series of 1977 televised interviews with former U.S. president Richard Nixon. (The exclusive interviews were the first major public appearance for Nixon after he resigned the presidency in shame in 1974; the interview was the basis for the play Frost/Nixon, and for a 2008 movie of the same name starring Michael Sheen as Frost and Frank Langella as Nixon.)

Over the course of his career, David Frost interviewed dozens of celebrities and newsmakers, including Henry Kissinger, George H.W. Bush, Prince Charles, Margaret Thatcher, Reza Shah Pahlavi and Benazir Bhutto.

Frost was knighted in 1992, and by then he was a British broadcasting legend who rubbed elbows with the rich and powerful. He joined Al Jazeera’s English-language TV channel in 2006 with the show Frost Over the World.