Margaret Thatcher, Former British Prime Minister, Dies At 87

One of Great Britain’s longest-serving prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher, died at her home in London today at age 87. The official cause of death was a stroke, but the famed political leader and the U.K.’s first female prime minister had been suffering from dementia and other ailments for some time.

Thatcher, who was also known as the Iron Lady—so dubbed by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev—was a grocer’s daughter who went on to study chemistry at Oxford University from 1943–47. According to her official biography, “her tutor was Dorothy Hodgkin, a pioneer of X-ray crystallography who won a Nobel Prize in 1964. Her outlook was profoundly influenced by her scientific training.”

Thatcher’s conservative government, which lasted from 1979 until 1990, brought in waves of economic reforms in the U.K. Her policies were credited with reviving the nation’s economy but doing so at the expense, for example, of education and social welfare programs. She was a contemporary and great friend of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.