// BBC ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS — MODA & SOCIETÀ
Dame Esther Rantzen: That's Life! presenter, Childline founder and campaigner for assisted dying
Dame Esther Rantzen, who has died at the age of 86, was best known for presenting the BBC TV programme That's Life!
Over two decades, what started as a consumer programme with quirky asides became renowned for its high-profile campaigns, notably against child abuse.
It resulted in Dame Esther setting up Childline, a national telephone helpline for children suffering abuse or neglect.
She later became a renowned campaigner for older people and, in the last years of her life, for the legalisation of medically-assisted death.
Dame Esther Rantzen, broadcaster, campaigner and charity founder, dies aged 86
How That's Life! gave Esther Rantzen a career-defining moment
Esther Louise Rantzen was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire on 22 June 1940. Her paternal ancestors were Polish Jews.
Her father, Henry, who worked as a broadcast engineer for the BBC, had moved the family out of London to escape German bombing during World War Two.
The family returned to London when the war ended. She later recalled she hated the grey streets of the capital after the semi-rural idyll in which she had spent her early childhood.
After a spell at a private school, run by what she recalled was a sadistic headmistress, she went to the North London Collegiate School in Edgware, and then to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English.