Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci

Saturday 16 September 2006 00.05 BST

Oriana Fallaci, who has died of cancer aged 77, was a controversial Italian journalist and former war correspondent who, at her death, was facing charges of vilifying Islam under Italian law following the publication of her book, The Strength of Reason, one of three polemical works published since the September 11 attacks. Her Islamaphobic diatribes included comments such as Muslims "breed like rats".

Born into a working-class family, her father was leader of the underground movement in Florence during the second world war and he recruited Oriana, the eldest of his four daughters, as an assistant. She spent much of her childhood with him in the partisan bands, helping Allied soldiers escape through enemy lines.

Fallaci became a journalist at the age of 16 to help pay her way through medical school, but ill health forced her to give up her studies, and the day job developed into a dazzling career. Aside from the star-style interviews which made her name, she was an accomplished war reporter - in Vietnam, Latin America, the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. In 1968, she was shot and seriously wounded in the student riots before the Mexico City Olympics. She distilled her experiences into several bestselling books, such as Inshallah, a novel about Italian troops stationed in Lebanon in 1983.

Prosperity brought her homes in Manhattan, Florence and the Tuscan countryside. Tiny, and chain-smoking, she was also glamorous and stylish, with a taste for furs, jewels and large hats.

She began her career with celebrity interviews but progressed rapidly to international politicians such as Golda Meir, Haile Selassie, Henry Kissinger and Indira Gandhi. The "La Fallaci" style of interview became something of a cult in North America - adversarial, emotional and extremely lengthy.

She would spend weeks researching her subject in obsessive detail and the interview itself, in which she relied entirely on a tape recorder, would last six or seven hours. If her favourite subjects were Golda Meir and Indira Ghandi, her least favourite was the Shah of Iran, whom she needled into a damning dismissal of women: "Women are important. only if they're beautiful and charming and keep their femininity. you're equal in the eyes of the law, but not. in intelligence."

In an interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini, she ripped off her chador. She complained about Fidel Castro's body odour and threw her microphone at Muhammad Ali's face when he belched in answer to one of her questions.

Her interviews appeared mainly in L'Europeo, the Italian magazine for which she worked for 23 years ("It died when I left"). She described her interviews as "coitus" and "a seduction" and hated using interpreters ("the stranger's body between two people making love"). She spoke English, French and Spanish, as well as Italian.

She abhorred marriage yet longed for children. She was very conscious of the warring claims this entailed: "You cannot work and be at home with your child. But you want both." The strands of her life appeared to come together when she interviewed Alexandros Panagoulis, a Greek anarchist condemned to death for the attempted assassination of junta leader Georgios Papadopoulous in 1967. Panagoulis was released in 1973, when the colonels fell, after three years of torture and imprisonment.

A colleague of Fallaci's in the Milan office of L'Europeo announced he was going to meet Panagoulis, due to be released that day. Fallaci instantly cancelled an interview with the then German chancellor Willy Brandt, which had taken her eight months to arrange, and said with characteristic imperiousness: "You are not going. I am." Fallaci spent the next three years enslaved to a man who had been intent on heroic death. He reminded her, she said, of the reckless partisan fighters of her youth, particularly her father.

In her book A Man (1977) - the memoir she wrote to Panagoulis after he was killed in May 1976 in a car crash she believed was assassination - she tells how she lost the baby she wanted so badly after Panagoulis had kicked her in the stomach. She also describes the endless battles to dissuade him from suicidal guerrilla attacks. She dubs herself Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote but she comes across more as nanny to a juvenile delinquent. However, there was no doubt that he was her soulmate ("My lover, my husband without contract, my political comrade, my friend").

Her last major assignment was the first Gulf war in 1990. Fallaci demanded to be escorted to Khafji, scene of the first land battle. It appeared impossible. Journalists were not allowed anywhere near the fighting except in small, tightly controlled groups. But a local newspaper editor, charmed by the idea of aiding a journalistic legend, rashly promised to use his influence to get her a military escort to the front. When he proved unable to deliver, Fallaci threw a celebrity-sized tantrum. She screamed and ranted, threatening to kill herself to provide news for her newspaper in the absence of war tidings. The editor ended up in hospital with heart palpitations.

At the time, Fallaci likened it to an experience in North Vietnam in 1969, when officials restricted her travel and vetted the soldiers she interviewed. "It was more than censorship. It's like a cancer," she said.

Two years later, she was diagnosed with the cancer that had killed her father, mother and one sister and withdrew into reclusive exile in her flat in Manhattan. But after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, the editor of Italy's best-selling newspaper, Corriere della Sera, persuaded her to write a piece. Her 14,000-word article was, to say the least, a departure from the sober, moderate, intelligent conservatism for which Corriere is renowned.

"You ask me about the contrast between the two cultures? Well, to be honest, it annoys me even to talk about two cultures, to put them on the same plane," Fallaci wrote. "Let's be honest. Our cathedrals are more beautiful than the mosques and the synagogues." What readers got was far more than a cry of outrage. It was a rant that made no distinction between the terrorists responsible for 9/11 and the rest of the Muslim world.

Corriere's publishing arm, Rizzoli, turned the article into a book, La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride), and within little over a month it had sold 700,000 copies. Two further books were written in much the same vein. The most recent, Oriana Fallaci intervista sé stessa - L'Apocalisse, sold some two million copies globally.

Fallaci's diatribes prompted law suits in France and Switzerland, and last year a judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo committed her for trial on charges of offending Islam. The attacks, however, served only to reinforce Fallaci's view of herself as a courageous, reviled prophet. Indeed, in her second book, she identified herself with a 14th century heretic burned at the stake.

In Italy. her writings endeared her to the right wing - libertarians, keen to defend her right to free speech; campaigners against immigration (particularly members of the xenophobic Northern League), and - paradoxically, in view of Fallaci's atheism - some in Italy's influential "theo-con" lobby.

Fallaci died at a clinic in Florence on the very day that Pope Benedict XVI came under attack from the Muslim world for expressing a view the writer would have endorsed, but thought all too mild.

· Oriana Fallaci, journalist, born June 29 1929; died September 15 2006