Thomas Hernandez
America’s sweetheart Diane Sawyer is probably best known for her work on ABC’s World News and Good Morning America — so when she opted to leave that all behind in 2014, people were understandably upset to see her go. But the iconic broadcast journalist was adamant that she was not slowing down or saying goodbye.
Since then, she’s remained relatively quiet, occasionally foraying into the world of investigative reporting and conducting highly coveted interviews with some of the world’s most famous people. So why did she ultimately decide to move more out of the spotlight?
Diane Sawyer lost her beloved mother, Jean Sawyer Hayes, in October 2014. As reported by the Courier-Journal, Hayes passed away at 94 years old in her home state of Kentucky. According to her obituary, Diane’s mother worked tirelessly for many years as an elementary school teacher and also served as a civic leader.
Sawyer recounted how her famous-in-a-small-town mother was often stopped on the street by former students to confess how her time with them left a lasting impact, telling the outlet,
“Her students by the hundreds were jolted into the possibilities of their lives. She was a pioneering spirit.”
Sawyer added that her mother was a force of nature, optimistic, spunky and energetic. There’s no doubt that the loss of her mother was a devastating and tremendous loss for Sawyer and likely something that still impacts her to this day.
Shockingly, Sawyer also lost her spouse just one month later. Sawyer and her husband, Mike Nichols, cherished 26 long and wonderful years together before he passed away at age 83 from a heart attack.
And while his wife was a famous journalist, make no mistake, Nichols was pretty famous in his own right, too. Nichols won a Best Director Academy Award in 1967 for his work on The Graduate, and was nominated the year prior for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In fact, Nichols was in the elite EGOT club, meaning he’s one of the few people in Hollywood to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. And, after five decades in the business, Nichols was working right up until the day of his death, adapting the play Master Class to an HBO series, starring the one and only Meryl Streep.
But even while accomplishing so much professionally, it appears Nichols was careful to always make time for romance. During a 2014 interview with Ladies Home Journal, Sawyer gushed about how thoughtful her husband was, telling the magazine,
“[Mike is] much more romantic than I am. He puts little notes in my sock drawer or in my suitcase before I leave for a work trip. I think one of the most romantic things is simply the way he reaches for my hand all the time.”
Nichols credited Sawyer, his fourth wife, for rescuing him from depression in his mid-50s, according to NPR. Sawyer told Ladies Home Journal that their bond was “indestructible,” saying,
“We rarely fight and I remember once when we were arguing he stopped in the middle of it and said, ‘Well, this is sort of fun, too.’ And it was! It was good to know that we could get out our strong feelings but that we were indestructible at the same time.”
While there’s no denying that Diane Sawyer left a lasting impact at World News, her replacement David Muir, known as “the Brad Pitt of news anchors,” flourished in his new role, and the show did as well. As reported by the New York Post, only months into the job, Muir helped the show win the fourth quarter in the adults aged 25-to-54 demographic for the first time in seven years over its rival, NBC’s Nightly News.
In May 2020, Diane Sawyer returned to the network for Our New Reality: A Diane Sawyer Special, a one-hour prime-time special about the COVID-19 crisis in America. At the time, ABC called it, quote, “the most challenging and complex story of her career.” Produced just five months into the pandemic, the special has Sawyer’s trademark professionalism and scholarship all over it, and is still worth watching today as a document of a rapidly changing America.
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