Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state dies at 84

Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War Two but rose to become the first female US secretary of state and, in her later years died on Wednesday at the age of 84, her family said.

Albright was a tough-talking diplomat in an administration that hesitated to involve itself in the two biggest foreign policy crises of the 1990s – the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“We are heartbroken to announce that Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, the 64th U.S. Secretary of State and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today. The cause was cancer,” the family said on Twitter.

Albright was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and US President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.

Born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague on May 15, 1937, her family fled in 1939 to London when Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. She attended school in Switzerland at age 10 and adopted the name Madeleine, Reuters reported.

Albright attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and got a doctorate from Columbia University. She became fluent or close to it in six languages including Czech, French, Polish and Russian as well as English.

She was nominated to become the first woman secretary of state, and confirmed unanimously in 1997. She was in the post until 2001.