TALENTED JOURNALIST WHO HAS GROWN ALMOST AS FAMOUS AS THE CELEBRITIES HE HAS INTERVIEWED

Martin Bashir is a British Journalist, born in London on 19 January 1963. He studied English and History at King Alfred’s College of Higher Education between 1982 and 1985 and at King’s College, London.

His career as a journalist began in 1986 and he worked for the BBC until 1999 on Songs of Praise, Public Eye and Panorama. He then moved over to ITV and worked on special documentary programmes and on features for Tonight with Trevor McDonald.

He rose to world wide prominence in 1995 when he interviewed the Princess of Wales who spoke about her struggle with bulimia, the breakdown of her marriage leading to divorce from the Prince of Wales in 1986, her affair with James Hewitt and the Prince of Wales’ relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.

This interview commanded a world wide audience and there were more than 22 million views in the UK. As a result, Martin won a Bafta TV award and was named Royal Television Society’s Journalist of the Year in 1996.

Martin Bashir conducted another famous interview for Panorama – with Louise Woodward, the British au pair convicted of the manslaughter of Matthew Eappen, a baby she was looking after in the US. The interview was conducted after her release from a US prison when her sentence was reduced from murder to manslaughter.

Other notable high profile interviews include the five men suspected of killing London teenager Stephen Lawrence, disgraced Tory peer Lord Archer, Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for killing a burglar, and former footballer George Best.

In 2003, Martin Bashir was allowed to trail Michael Jackson for a period of eight months and presented an exclusive interview during which viewers saw Jackson on a spending spree, and also questioned him about plastic surgery.

Martin lived and worked in New York from 2004, when he joined ABC News as co-anchor of Nightline. From December 2010 to December 2013, Martin was at NBC News as an MSNBC anchor and correspondent on NBC’s Dateline programme. He now lives in the UK.

Martin was appointed Religious Affairs Correspondent by the BBC in September 2016.