MILAN, 16 September 2006 — Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy’s best-known writers and war correspondents who goaded the world’s great and issued a vitriolic assault on Muslim extremism after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, died yesterday aged 77.
Fallaci died in her hometown of Florence after battling cancer for several years, a hospital official said.
Aggressive and provocative to the end, Fallaci made her name as a tenacious interviewer of some of the most famous leaders of the 20th century.
She quarreled with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, provoked US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into likening himself to a cowboy, and tore off a chador in a meeting with Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Fallaci set the pace for a daring life when she joined Italy’s anti-fascist resistance as a teenager during World War Two, then showed the same fearlessness as a war correspondent.
She covered conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Latin America at a time when few women braved the front lines, and was shot and beaten in 1968 during student demonstrations in Mexico.
Later, she succeeded in fiction with novels including “A Man,” inspired by her love affair with Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis.
Her exchanges with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the Shah of Iran, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and other leaders, collected in her book “Interview with History,” stood out for her provocative, uncompromising questioning. In her interview with Kissinger, Fallaci needled the US statesman until he agreed that the Vietnam War was “useless.”
Kissinger later wrote that her interview with him was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press.”
Many loved her confrontational style but others accused her of slander and taking quotes out of context to spice up a story.
