Jorge Sampaio, a former activist lawyer, Portuguese legislator, mayor of Lisbon, two-term president and UN envoy died Friday of unknown causes at age 81.

In Portugal, Sampaio was known as one of the most prominent political figures of his generation. He had been in precarious health in recent years and spent the final two weeks of his life in the hospital.

Over a more than half-century long career in Portuguese politics, he went from defending the victims of the Salazar dictatorship as a young lawyer to Socialist parliamentarian to mayor of Lisbon and finally two-term president before being named UN special envoy.

Sampaio's father studied public health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and his mother was an English teacher, allowing the future politician to master English at an early age.

In the late 1950s, he attended law school at Lisbon University and rose through the ranks of underground student movements before graduating to representing victims of the dictatorship.

He was known as a congenial bespectacled red-headed lawyer who found common cause with political prisoners incarcerated during the rule Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Dropping the 'atomic bomb' on Portugal's parliament

Salazar was toppled in 1974, and Sampaio took up his first government post in 1975 as secretary of state for foreign cooperation.

In 1978, Sampaio joined the Socialist Party. The following year, he was elected to the parliament and subsequently served five terms before serving as mayor of Lisbon from 1990 until 1995.

Sampaio successfully ran for president in 1996 and was reelected in 2001. He became famous for dissolving a majority-led center-right parliament in 2004, flexing the muscle of his office in what had heretofore been a largely ceremonial role.

The crisis started when Prime Minister Jose Manuel Durao Barroso resigned in July that year to lead the European Commission. A protest movement from left-leaning parties that included Sampaio's own Socialist Party resulted in instability, with Sampaio subsequently naming another moderate leftist, Pedro Santana Lopes, as prime minister.

Four months later though, Sampaio used his presidential powers to dissolve the parliament, an act often called the "atomic bomb” in Portuguese politics.

Sampaio brought in Jose Socrates as Prime Minister and told his biographer he had been "fed up with Santana Lopes,” claiming "he was leaving the country adrift.” Sampaio remains the only president ever to have used such powers.

After he left the presidency, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan named him envoy for tuberculosis. He was subsequently named UN envoy for the Alliance of Civilizations by Annan's successor, Ban Ki Moon.

'Fighter' for freedom and equality

The current president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, announced Sampaio's death in a televised address Friday.

"Jorge Sampaio was born and educated himself to become a fighter and his fight had a goal: freedom and equality," he told the nation, highlighting Sampaio's fight to end dictatorship and support for the independence of ex-colony East Timor and the rights of refugees.

Sampaio is survived by his second wife, Maria Jose Rita, and a son and a daughter.

ar/dj (AFP, AP, Reuters)