Madeleine Albright, the first female US secretary of state, has died of cancer aged 84.
Ms Albright fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War II and rose to become America's top diplomat, in her later years also becoming a pop culture feminist icon.
US president Bill Clinton appointed Ms Albright as secretary of state in 1996, and she served in that capacity for the last four years of his administration.
At the time, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of the US government.
She was not in the line of succession for the presidency, however, because she was a native of Czechoslovakia.
"She was surrounded by family and friends [when she died on Wednesday]," her family said in a statement on Twitter.
"We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend."
In her later years, Ms Albright became an icon to a generation of young women looking for inspiration in their quest for opportunity and respect in the workplace.
She was fond of saying: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other."
She advised women "to act in a more confident manner" and "to ask questions when they occur and don't wait to ask".
"It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent," she told HuffPost Living in 2010.
In 2012, US president Barack Obama awarded Ms Albright the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour, saying her life was an inspiration to all Americans.
Albright sought 'muscular internationalism'
Ms Albright, who had become the US ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, had pressed for a tougher line against the Serbs in Bosnia.
But during Mr Clinton's first term, many of the administration's top foreign policy experts vividly remembered how the United States became bogged down in Vietnam and they were determined to not repeat that error in the Balkans.
The United States responded by working with NATO on air strikes that forced an end to the war but only after it had been going on for three years.
Ms Albright's experience as a refugee prompted her to push for the United States to be a superpower which used that clout.
She wanted a "muscular internationalism", said James O'Brien, a senior adviser to Ms Albright during the Bosnian war.
She once upset a Pentagon chief by asking why the military maintained more than 1 million men and women under arms if they never used them.
Early in the Clinton administration, while she unsuccessfully advocated for a quicker, stronger response in Bosnia, Ms Albright backed a United Nations war crimes tribunal that eventually put the architects of that war, including Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leaders, in jail, Mr O'Brien said.
The plain-spoken Ms Albright took a tough line on a 1996 incident where Cuban jet fighters downed two unarmed US-based planes, saying, "This is not cojones, this is cowardice," using a Spanish vulgarity meaning "testicles".
During efforts to press North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program, which were eventually unsuccessful, Ms Albright travelled to Pyongyang in 2000 to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, becoming the highest-ranking US official to visit the secretive communist-run country.
ABC/wires
