With her familiar toothy smile and irrepressible campaigning zeal, Esther Rantzen was a broadcasting phenomenon.
For more than 20 years, as presenter and producer of the BBC’s That’s Life!, she was the reigning queen of Sunday night television, regularly attracting audiences of more than 20 million.
The show, which she helped devise, was a ground-breaking mix of hard-hitting consumer investigations interspersed with humorous skits and songs and jokey vox pops.
Its investigations ran the gamut from dodgy sales reps and faulty washing machines to child sex abuse by staff at a boys’ boarding school, which led to it being shut down.
It provided the platform from which Rantzen launched ChildLine – the confidential counselling service for young people in distress – after she issued an appeal to viewers for help with a survey on child abuse, only to be overwhelmed by the response.
At the same time, it was the programme that gave the world odd odes, talented tots, suggestively-shaped vegetables and a dog that said “sausages”.
It was not, as she recalled, an easy combination to pull off.
“We had to learn how to change gear,” she later said.
“When you are talking about the life and death of a toddler who could only be saved by a transplant, you couldn’t immediately then go into a song and dance, or a talking dog. It’s quite difficult.”
It was, however, a feat that she managed with rare aplomb.
When the show finally ended in 1994, she continued to broadcast and campaign prolifically with her own chat show and appearances on the reality shows Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!.
In 2012 – 26 years after she founded ChildLine – she launched The Silver Line, a similar service aimed at older people suffering loneliness and isolation, in part inspired by her own experiences following the death of her husband, Desmond Wilcox.
After being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2023, she became an impassioned supporter of the campaign to legalise assisted dying for people who are terminally ill.
She herself signed up for the Dignitas assisted dying clinic in Switzerland but had to abandon her plan to end her life there after she became too ill to travel.
When a private member’s bill to change the law in England and Wales was finally defeated in September 2026, she said it was a “tragic day”, which would deny people the choice open to those in other countries around the world to end their suffering.
Esther Louise Rantzen was born on June 22 1940 in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, the older of two daughters in a Jewish family.
Her father was an electrical engineer and she was sent to the North London Collegiate School, an all-girls independent school, from where she won a place to read English at Somerville College, Oxford.
At Oxford, she indulged her enthusiasm for acting, performing with the university dramatic society, becoming secretary of the experimental theatre club as well as joining the local theatre group.
After graduating and then training as a secretary, she joined the BBC initially as a trainee sound effects assistant.
Having worked as a researcher on a number of current affairs programmes, her breakthrough came when she joined the consumer affairs programme Braden’s Week and the producer decided to put the researchers working on its stories on screen.
When presenter Bernard Braden returned to his native Canada in 1972, Rantzen was picked to host and produce a new programme along similar lines – and so That’s Life! was born.
While it continued with Braden’s mix of serious and humorous items, it took the formula to a new level, building a huge following and establishing Rantzen as one of the most familiar faces on British television.
One of the programme’s most memorable episodes came in 1988 when it reunited 79-year-old Nicholas Winton with a roomful of some of the 669 mainly Jewish children whose escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia he had engineered 50 years earlier.
Mr Winton was reduced to tears after Rantzen asked first if anyone in the audience owed their lives to him and around two dozen stood up, and then if anyone was a child or grandchild of someone who owed their lives to him, and the rest rose to their feet.
He was subsequently knighted for his achievements.
The programme’s campaigns led to the introduction of safe playground surfaces, a legal requirement for seat belts for children in cars and an upsurge in organ donations after it highlighted the case of two-year-old Ben Hardwick, who was dying of liver disease.
After the murder of toddler Heidi Koseda, who was left to starve in a locked bedroom, Rantzen urged BBC bosses to run a special edition inviting viewers to participate in a survey if they had suffered abuse as a child.
A temporary helpline opened after the show had aired was swamped with calls – more than 50,000 attempted to get through on that night alone – mostly from children who were being sexually abused.
“I will never forget walking into my office the morning after the programme to meet the social workers who had been running the helpline,” Rantzen recalled.
“I knew in that moment that working to help protect abused children was more important to me than any of my previous work. As I heard about these hidden children, all guarding a terrible secret, I passionately wanted to be able to help them.
“And I realised that if we could keep our lines open throughout the year, we might be able to help hundreds, maybe thousands more children.”
The result was the creation of ChildLine with the Variety Club and the Department of Health each stumping up £25,000 while BT provided a freephone number – 0800 1111 – that would not show up on phone bills.
Staffed by volunteer counsellors – Rantzen among them – it went on to provide confidential support to more than 4 million young people, eventually merging with the NSPCC in 2005.
Rantzen’s rise at the BBC was not without controversy. In 1968, she had begun an affair with the documentary maker Desmond Wilcox, who was the head of her department. He was also married to her close friend, Patsy, with whom he had a child.
The ensuing scandal came to a head in 1977 – just as That’s Life! was hitting its peak viewing figures – when Rantzen became pregnant and Patsy finally agreed to a divorce.
The fallout led to Wilcox resigning from the BBC while Patsy never forgave her former friend for what she regarded as her betrayal. Rantzen and Wilcox married a month before their first child was born.
Looking back years later, Rantzen said: “Our marriage lasted and we have three wonderful children, so I don’t regret it. But I wish it had happened differently.”
Away from That’s Life!, she was involved in producing the reality series Hearts Of Gold and The Big Time, which discovered the Scottish singer Sheena Easton.
She was hit hard by Wilcox’s death in 2000, writing movingly about her experience of loneliness, which eventually fed into the creation of The Silver Line.
She subsequently made the documentary How To Have A Good Death, following patients and their families through the palliative care system and examining the options available to people at the end of their lives
In 2009, prompted by the MPs’ expenses scandal, she briefly entered politics, announcing her intention to stand in Luton South if the incumbent Labour MP Margaret Moran – who had been criticised for claiming £23,000 to eliminate dry rot from her second home in Southampton – ran again.
Two days later, Ms Moran announced she would not be a candidate, but Rantzen stood anyway as an independent in the general election the following year.
She was, however, unable to repeat the success of former BBC war reporter Martin Bell – who was elected 13 years earlier in the wake of the cash-for-questions scandal – losing her deposit after receiving just 1,872 votes.
In 2011, Rantzen disclosed that she had been sexually abused as a teenager by an older male – not a family member – but that her mother did not really believe her when she tried to tell her what had happened.
She insisted, however, that the experience had not been a factor in her setting up ChildLine.
In 2015 she received a damehood in recognition of her services to children and older people, having previously been made an OBE in 1991 and a CBE in 2006.
In January 2023, she went public with her diagnosis of lung cancer, saying that she found it difficult “to skulk around various hospitals wearing an unconvincing disguise, and because I would rather you heard the facts from me”.
When, in 2024, the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater tabled a private member’s bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, it reignited Rantzen’s campaigning instincts as she became one of its most vocal and most influential supporters.
She explained that she believed that she and others in her position should have the choice of shortening their death, not least to spare their loved ones from seeing them “suffering pain or indignity”.
Earlier this year, she revealed the “miracle drug” that had been keeping her alive was no longer working, and that she would not live long enough to see the change she believed was ultimately inevitable pass into law.
