"Painter of Light" Thomas Kinkade.

No official confirmation yet, but at least one site is reporting that Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes has died.

For the benefit of my fellow non-Americans, he was played by Christopher Plummer in Michael Mann's The Insider (though Wallace, by all accounts, didn't consider it a very flattering portrayal).

Mike Wallace rose to prominence in 1956 with the New York City television interview program, Night-Beat, which soon developed into the nationally televised prime-time program, The Mike Wallace Interview. Well prepared with extensive research, Wallace asked probing questions of guests framed in tight close-ups. The result was a series of compelling and revealing interviews with some of the most interesting and important people of the day.

The Mike Wallace Interview ran from 1957 to 1960, but the Ransom Center collection includes interviews from only 1957 and 1958. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wallace donated to the Ransom Center kinescopes of these programs and related materials, including his prepared questions, research material, and correspondence.

Copyright of all of the interviews is held by Mike Wallace, who generously agreed to allow the Ransom Center to present them here in their entirety. Any further use of this material requires the permission of both Mike Wallace and the Ransom Center.

There are 65 interviews in the Ransom Center's collection. Five are on audio tape, and the others are kinescopes, 16mm recordings of the television programs made by filming the picture from a video monitor.

Mike Wallace interviewed Frank Lloyd Wright back in 1957. It's a decent interview, but really, it just blows my mind that a person born in 1867 was interviewed by a person who would die in 2012. History is not that long ago.

William Finley.

The interview I remember by Mike Wallace was the one with Barbara Streisand. He quoted someone who called her an "ego maniac" or words to that effect, and she wasn't best pleased. A far cry from the sychophantic, celebrity fluff you get these days.