Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died "peacefully" at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family announced on Monday. Lady Thatcher served as the Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and was the first woman serving in that role.
U.S. President Barack Obama said the world "lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty and that America has lost a true friend." Other world leaders, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would "never forget her part in surmounting the division of Europe and at the end of the Cold War."
Current British Prime Minister David Cameron added, "Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds. The real thing is didn't just lead our country, she saved our county. I believe she will go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister."
Thatcher was elected to Parliament at 34, and became its leader at age 50. By 1979, she was prime minister, transforming the British economy and took on its welfare state and powerful unions. Her government closed or sold state-owned industries, notably struggling steel plants and coal mines, to the private sector and radically cut taxes and public spending, as reported by NBCNews.com. She had her share of detractors, but few argued she was one of world's most powerful leaders.
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of people's money," she had once said.
During her tenure, Britain fought and won a war with Argentina for the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean, determined to preserve on the last outpost of the already faded British empire.
Thatcher survived an assassination attempt in 1984 when an Irish Republican Army bomb exploded at a Conservative Party conference in Brighton, killing five people and injuring a cabinet minister.
"The attack has failed. All attempts to destroy democracy will fail," she later said.
Her friendship with U.S. President Ronald Reagan was well-known, sharing their public opposition to the Soviet Union during the remaining years of the cold war. When Reagan died in 2004, Thatcher eulogized, "We have lost a great president, a great American and a great man. And I have lost a dear friend."
In her twilight years, Thatcher had been suffering from dementia, even having to be reminded that he husband was dead. Some of this was captured in Meryl Streep's Oscar-winning performance, portryaying "The Iron Lady" two years ago.
"To me she was a figure of awe for her personal strength and grit. To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement," Streep said in a statement. "To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real-life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable."
Prime Minister Cameron said on Monday that the former prime minster's funeral will receive a military service at St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
