Alistair Cooke, the urbane former host of "Masterpiece Theatre" who died Tuesday at age 95, liked to joke about how he would be remembered.
His immortality, he chuckled, would come not from his brief, cogent introductions to public television classics such as "Upstairs, Downstairs" but from the "Sesame Street" knockoff character Alistair Cookie, host of "Monsterpiece Theater."
He recounted a story of a little girl coming up to him in an airport and asking if he was the real Alistair Cookie.
"Fifty years from now," he said, "when the names of all current television stars will have been forgotten, there will be some old lady saying, 'I once met Alistair Cookie. . . . ' "
A radio fixture for delivering his "Letter From America" to the British Broadcasting Corp. for 58 years, Cooke died at his home in New York. No cause of death was given, but Cooke had retired because of heart disease.
"He was really one of the greatest broadcasters of all time, and we shall feel his loss very, very keenly, indeed," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.
Cooke led a grand kind of journalistic journeyman's life, working as a film critic for the BBC, a U.S.-based reporter for several top British newspapers (notably the Manchester Guardian), author of 12 books — including "Alistair Cooke's America" (1973), a companion to his acclaimed 13-part NBC TV series that sold more than 800,000 copies in hardcover — and host of the 1950s' arts anthology "Omnibus."
But it was as the first host of "Masterpiece Theatre" that Americans, and not just Anglophiles, knew him best.
Starting in 1971 until his retirement in 1992 (when he was replaced by Russell Baker), Cooke appeared on PBS every Sunday evening. Usually seated in a high-backed chair, legs crossed precisely, trousers creased just so, he would provide historical background on the author or the era tackled in that night's "Masterpiece Theatre," from the vicious Roman intrigue of "I, Claudius" to the subtle spycraft of John LeCarre.
Cooke once recalled how he was approached by Boston station WGBH, the "Masterpiece Theatre" producer, with the idea that they would import "all the good drama that's being done in Britain — BBC, Granada, Yorkshire Television, whoever — and run it week after week on Sunday evenings as a continuous series."
What's now an institution was then very innovative, and Cooke's response was "What's that got to do with me?"
A WGBH executive said that someone was needed to explain, say, the six wives of Henry VIII or the politics of Prime Minister Lloyd George. Although Cooke begged off, saying he was too busy, he eventually relented. He was 63 when he started.
And while he was not involved in selecting which shows would air, he watched them all and wrote every word of his own introductions.
Cooke was born Nov. 20, 1908, in Manchester, England, and graduated summa cum laude in English from Jesus College, Cambridge. He worked for the BBC as a reporter covering America and did graduate work at Yale and Harvard universities.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1941, which prevented him from using "Sir" in front of his name when Queen Elizabeth II made him a Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1973.
He won four Emmy Awards and three George Foster Peabody Awards for broadcasting.
British by birth, American by choice, Cooke spent the first half of his life as a journalist explaining America to the British, and the second half as a TV host explaining England to Americans.
"For many Americans he will always be associated with the best of Britain," said William Farish, the U.S. ambassador in London. "He had movie star good looks, a poised and effortless manner, a first-class mind and, most flatteringly, a sincere and abiding interest in all things American."
Phil Kloer writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Associated Press contributed to this article.
E-mail: pkloer@ajc.com