Madeleine Albright, the barrier-breaking political leader who immigrated to the United States as a refugee and eventually became the first woman to ever serve as Secretary of State, died Wednesday of cancer. She was 84.
“She was surrounded by family and friends,” her family said in a statement. “We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, and friend.”
Albright, who was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague in 1937, became a leading expert on foreign policy during a political career that eventually brought her around the world as U.S. Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, a position that made her the highest-ranking woman in U.S. government history at the time.
Read more at TIME Magazine.