Veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost has died at the age of 74, his family said.
Prime Minister David Cameron led the tributes to the journalist, saying he was "both a friend and a fearsome interviewer".
Frost's career, spanning journalism, comedy and presenting, included his famous interviews with disgraced US President Richard Nixon.
A statement said: "His family are devastated and ask for privacy at this difficult time.
"A family funeral will be held in the near future and details of a memorial service will be announced in due course."
Frost - who probably interviewed more world figures from royalty, politics, the Church, show-business and virtually everywhere else, than any other living broadcaster - was the most illustrious TV inquisitor of his generation.
He not only won virtually all the major television awards available, but his professional activities were so diverse that he was once described as "a one-man conglomerate".
He was regularly scoffed at by fellow broadcasters for his allegedly non-aggressive style of questioning.
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Sir David Frost
But he invariably had the last laugh because he almost always extracted more intriguing information and revealing reactions from his subjects than other far more acerbic broadcasters who boasted about their hard-hitting treatment of their "victims".
He was as affable and effusive off-screen as he was on it. And his cheery trademark introduction, "Hello, good morning and welcome" to his long running BBC1 Sunday programme Breakfast With Frost set the amiable tone for what was to follow.
'I LET DOWN THE COUNTRY' (STORY CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO)
His interview with the doomed American President "Tricky Dicky" Richard Nixon was a TV classic. During it, Nixon dramatically admitted that he had "let down the country".
But there were many other historic moments, including one when he suddenly introduced the word "bonkers" during a tense interview with the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher over the sinking of the Argentine warship the Belgrano during the Falklands conflict.
She was furious.