Carol Barnes had been due to fly to South Africa in a few days' time. After a monstrously tragic period in her life, she was, say her friends, starting to "turn toward the light" again, reviving her career and booking herself a holiday.

So the timing of her collapse, apparently from a massive stroke, was exquisitely cruel. If anyone was due some good fortune, it was surely her. But last night she remained gravely ill at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, her family at her bedside.

Less than three years ago Barnes, 63, for three decades a leading face of ITV News, could at times scarcely drag herself out of bed, so devastated was she over the death of her daughter, Clare, with the former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane, who was killed in a parachuting accident in 2004 in Australia. On Clare's 25th birthday in 2005 she had a small tattoo on her ankle in her daughter's memory, a butterfly in mid-flight.

"I've been horribly depressed," she said. "There were times when I'd wake up and I didn't want to get out of bed. In the early stages when I wasn't working I thought: 'Sod it,' and I'd stay there". She later received a one year driving ban after being caught drink driving near her home in Brighton and was required to relinquish her role as a magistrate. Her 17-year marriage to cameraman Nigel Thomson with whom she has a son, James, ended in 1998.

But latterly her natural enthusiasm for life had started to prevail. Verity Smart, editor of Absolute London and Absolute Brighton magazines for whom Barnes writes a monthly column, said “In recent months she was picking her life up. Obviously the death of Clare was something she’d never get over, but in recent conversations she’d talked about booking a holiday, she was due out in South Africa this week for two weeks. Carol was the life and soul of the party; she could put an act on, put on the makeup on and go out. People do adore her".

This is true. Carol Barnes the newsreader had a knack of engaging with the viewer, a talent which won her Newscaster of the Year award in 1984. Nicholas Owen, her former ITN colleague, said yesterday: "The Carol Barnes secret is she appeared to viewers to be a thoroughly nice, straightforward person who they could identify with. That’s exactly what she is like. There’s no difference between the pleasant, switched on Carol on-screen and the pleasant, switched-on Carol off-screen. People recognise that she is genuine and it works. There is quite a lot of artifice in television but none of that applies to Carol."

It is ironic that as she fights for her own life, it is only a few weeks ago that she was helping to save someone else's. In January Barnes fronted the extremely moving ITV documentary Saving Ed Mitchell in which she followed Mitchell, another former journalistic colleague who had become a homeless alcoholic in Brighton, over Christmas.

As a result of the publicity he secured funding for The Priory and has since been sober. He was unavailable for comment yesterday having signed an exclusive deal with the Daily Mirror. But David Hodgkinson, the programme's director, said: "I know that she was the right person to tell the Mitchell story. Alcoholism is too often dismissed as something which is only happens to certain people. But it can affect everyone. Carol went through her own tragedy, also something that could happen to anyone, and this helped her to empathise not only with what Ed was going through but the impact that it had had upon the family."

Barnes was born in Norwich but raised in Tooting, South London, and started her career as a teacher before joining ITN as a reporter in 1975. She went on to present all of ITV's main news programmes, and worked on the now-defunct ITV News Channel when it opened in 2000. She had a relationship with Dennis MacShane in the late 1970s and she gave birth to Clare. The couple never married and she later met Thomson. Clare's death has recently rekindled her friendship with Mr MacShane. They travelled together to Australia when the tragedy happened, organising the funeral together.

Nicholas Owen said: “I’ve known Carol for 20 years — we were friends first and colleagues second. I still remember the appalling day when she phoned us to tell the unbelievable news . I expected it would alter Carol completely but it didn’t. Yes, the sadness was there, she would talk about Clare. But she got on with life, she was a JP, she would carry on with her golf. We would sometimes pause in a round and we would both pat each other on the back. It tore her to bits, I know, but Carol also had a great enthusiasm for life. She’s not one of these people who are morbid. She doesn’t dwell on the darknesses. She picks herself up and smiles.”

Sir David Nicholas, the former head of ITN, credits Barnes with being one of the first heavyweight female presenters of network news with a sharp intelligence and gutsiness coupled with glamour. "I remember her covering the Brixton riots while she was still heavily pregnant", he said.

"There was another occasion when the Ayatollah Khomeini was still in exile in France, Carol was one of the reporters who covered him at his place of exile — she was heavily pregnant then too. When the Ayatollah went back to Tehran after the overthrow of the Shah, in the wild manic scenes, I sent a male reporter to cover it. Carol said: ' It’s my story, I want to cover it. ' I couldn’t send a pregnant woman to the mad streets of Tehran but I enormously admired her for that. She was afraid of flying, obviously quite a problem for a foreign correspondent, and she learnt to become a private pilot, qualified as one and conquered her fear."

The affection in which Barnes is still held by the viewing public was illustrated by the sackloads of mail which she received after Clare's death. The one letter which never fails to make her cry is from a girl who had been a sky diver and had a similar accident but survived. "She told me that as she was crashing she felt no fear or pain", said Barnes. "The only thought going through her mind was: 'Sorry, Mum'."

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