David Frost, the iconoclastic British broadcaster best known for interviewing former President Richard M. Nixon after he resigned from office in disgrace, died on Saturday night. He was 74.
His death, which was announced in a statement by the Frost family to the BBC, was confirmed by a spokesman for Al Jazeera English, where Mr. Frost hosted an interview program. The statement said Mr. Frost died, possibly of a heart attack, while aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship, where he was scheduled to give a speech.
Mr. Frost had just moved to a home close to Oxford, according to Richard Brock, his executive producer at Al Jazeera English. He also had a home in London.
Known for incisive interviews of leading public figures, Mr. Frost spent more than 50 years in television. Since 2006, he has conducted newsmaker interviews for Al Jazeera English, one of the BBC’s main competitors overseas.
“No matter who he was interviewing, he was committed to getting the very best out of the discussion, but always doing so by getting to know his guest, engaging with them and entering into a proper conversation,” Al Anstey, the managing director of Al Jazeera English, said in an message.
“His humor, intelligence and unique character on-air was no different away from the cameras,” Mr. Anstey said. “He was a great journalist, a legendary interviewer, but always a true gentleman.”
Among his guests on Al Jazeera were the first President George Bush, George Clooney and the tennis star Martina Navratilova. One of his first interviews for Al Jazeera made headlines when his guest Tony Blair agreed with Mr. Frost’s assessment that the Iraq war had, up until that point in 2006, “been pretty much of a disaster.” More recently, in 2011, Mr. Frost sat with Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary.
A new season of Mr. Frost’s program, “The Frost Interview,” began in July with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The season was scheduled to continue through mid-September.
David Paradine Frost was born April 7, 1939, in Tenterden, England, to Mona and W. J. Paradine Frost. His father was a Methodist minister. While a student, Mr. Frost edited both a student newspaper and a literary publication at Cambridge University, where he showed a great talent for satire — something the BBC soon capitalized on.
In 1962, Mr. Frost became the host of “That Was the Week That Was,” a satirical look at the news on Saturday nights. While it lasted for only two seasons in Britain, “TW3,” as it was known, was reborn briefly as a program on NBC in the United States, and it is remembered as a forerunner to “The Daily Show” and the “Weekend Update” segment on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” After “TW3,” Mr. Frost hosted a succession of programs in Britain, from game shows to intellectually rigorous talk shows.
In his penetrating interviews with President Nixon in 1977, which were later immortalized in a play and a film both named “Frost/Nixon,” Mr. Frost asked about Mr. Nixon’s abuses of presidential power, prompting this answer: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
“Upon hearing that sentence, I could scarcely believe my ears,” Mr. Frost wrote in a 2009 book about the interview, published on the occasion of the “Frost/Nixon” movie. Mr. Frost said his task then “was to keep him talking on this theme for as long as possible.”
By then, Mr. Frost and Mr. Nixon had already spoken on camera several times. And they continued to speak: the interviews, for which Mr. Nixon was paid $600,000 and a share of the profit for the broadcasts, totaled nearly 29 hours, and were taped over four weeks for about two hours at a time.
On the last day, Mr. Nixon apologized for putting “the American people through two years of needless agony.” Since then, whenever Mr. Frost was asked about the highlight of his career, he cited the Nixon interview.
“The Nixon interviews were among the great broadcast moments, but there were many other brilliant interviews,” Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said in a statement on Sunday morning.
Survivors include his wife, Carina, and their three sons.
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