Dame Esther Rantzen dies aged 86: the broadcaster who turned television into a lifeline
Her family said the That's Life! presenter and founder of Childline and The Silver Line died at her New Forest home, and praised her ‘endless capacity for joy’.
Dame Esther Rantzen, the BAFTA-winning broadcaster who fronted That's Life! for two decades and founded the children's charity Childline, has died aged 86, her family announced on Wednesday.
She died at her home in the New Forest surrounded by loved ones. Her children, Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua Wilcox, said their ‘adored mother’ had left a ‘legacy of compassion and understanding’ that would live on in her charities, Childline and The Silver Line. ‘She was our sunshine,’ they said.
‘We are grateful she is finally at rest with her beloved husband, Desmond Wilcox, but we will miss her immeasurably,’ the family said. ‘She was the most wonderful mother to us three children and a cherished grandmother to her five treasured grandchildren.’
Born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, on 22 June 1940, Rantzen read English at Somerville College, Oxford, before joining BBC Radio in 1963. She moved into television as a researcher, and in 1973 was chosen to front That's Life!, which at its peak drew more than 20 million viewers and ran until 1994.
The programme's most enduring legacy followed a feature on child abuse: when the phone lines were opened for 48 hours they were inundated with calls from children, prompting Rantzen to establish Childline as a permanent, confidential helpline in 1986. It merged with the NSPCC in 2006. The NSPCC's chief executive called her ‘a unique and truly remarkable woman’ who leaves behind an ‘extraordinary legacy’, estimating that millions of children had been helped in the 40 years since the helpline was founded.
Her honours tracked her influence: an OBE in 1991, a CBE in 2006, BAFTA's Richard Dimbleby Award, and a damehood in the 2015 New Year Honours. After That's Life! ended she hosted a BBC Two chat show that ran for 600 episodes, appeared in the second series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2004, and on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! in 2008.
Following the death of her husband, the documentary maker Desmond Wilcox, in 2000, she turned her attention to loneliness among older people and founded the confidential helpline The Silver Line.
In her final years she became a leading voice in the campaign to legalise assisted dying, after a stage-four lung cancer diagnosis she made public in 2023. She openly discussed plans to travel to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland and criticised the ‘messy and cruel’ law in England and Wales; in September she said she had become too physically frail to make the journey. The Bill ran out of time in the Lords after more than 1,000 amendments were tabled. Kim Leadbeater MP, who brought the Bill to Parliament, described her as ‘a strong, warm and compassionate woman and a fighter to the end’.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Dame Esther had ‘changed countless lives and gave a voice to people who often went unheard’. The television presenter Davina McCall wrote that she had ‘made the world a better place, and inspired so many of us to do better and live life to its fullest’. Martin Lewis praised her as an ‘inspiration’ and a ‘pioneer’ whose ‘impact and memory will long continue to shine’.
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