Television Legend Phil Donahue Dies

Phil Donahue, whose landmark daytime talk show launched an indelible television genre that brought success to Oprah Winfrey, Montel Williams, Ellen DeGeneres and many others, has died. He was 88 years old.

NBC’s “Today” show cited family members as saying Donahue died Sunday after a long illness.

Dubbed the “King of Daytime Talk,” Donahue was the first to incorporate audience participation into a talk show, usually with a single guest throughout the hour.

Only one guest per show? No band?” he recalled being routinely asked in his 1979 memoir, “Donahue, My Own Story.”

This format set “The Phil Donahue Show” apart from other interview shows of the 1960s and made it a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was especially popular with female audiences.

Later renamed “Donahue”, the program began in 1967 in Dayton, Ohio. Donahue’s desire to explore the hot-button social issues of the day was immediately apparent, when he featured atheist Madeleine Murray O’Hair as his first guest. He would later broadcast shows on feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection, and civil rights, among hundreds of other topics.

The show was syndicated in 1970 and ran on national television for the next 26 years, garnering 20 Emmy Awards for the show and Donahue as host, as well as a Peabody for Donahue in 1980. In May, President Joe Biden presented the Presidential Award. Donahue received the Medal of Freedom, cited as a daytime talk show pioneer.

The show included radio-style call-ins, which Donahue greeted with his signature, “Is the caller there?”

The show’s last episode aired in 1996 in New York, where Donahue was living with his wife, actor Marlo Thomas. He met Thomas, the “That Girl” star of the 1960s who was a household name at the time and would later become a regular on “Friends,” when she appeared on his show in 1977.

He later said it was love at first sight, and they did a poor job of hiding it on the air.

You’re really charming,” Donahue said, taking Thomas’s hand. “You’re wonderful,” Thomas returned. “You’re loving and generous, and you like women and it’s a pleasure, and Whatever woman you have in your life, she is very lucky.”

Both were married since 1980. Donahue had five children, four sons and a daughter, from a previous marriage.

Donahue briefly returned to television in 2002, hosting another “Donahue” show on MSNBC. The network canceled it after six months, citing ratings — though a later leaked email suggests it was about politics.

He was born Philip John Donahue on December 21, 1935, to a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland.

Donahue was in the first graduating class in 1953 at St. Edward High School, a Catholic all-boys preparatory school in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1957 with a degree in business administration. He rebelled against the church, and left, though he recalled in his book that “a little piece” of his faith would always be with him.

After a series of early jobs in radio and TV, Donahue was invited in 1967 to anchor an old radio talk show at Dayton’s WLWD television station. It moved to Chicago in 1974, where it remained for years, then ended its run in New York.

The show featured conversations with spiritual leaders, doctors, homemakers, activists and entertainers or politicians who happened to be passing through the city. Her neighbor, Irma Bombeck, comedian and syndicated columnist, was a frequent guest.

He said that the attack on the show’s winning formula was a happy accident.

“It would be three full years before any of us realized that our program was anything special,” phil wrote. “The style of the show evolved not out of genius, but out of necessity. The familiar talk show hosts in Dayton, Ohio, were unavailable to us. … The result was improvisation.

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This gave the show a freedom that lasted as it was ranked number 1 in its class.

With an affable demeanor and salt-and-pepper hair, phil boxed alongside Muhammad Ali. He played football with Alice Cooper. Her guests gave cooking lessons, taught breakdancing and, more controversially, “mansharing,” being a mistress, gay motherhood or — via compilation video — the shows banned in some cities. Implanted — How natural childbirth, abortion or reverse vasectomy worked. .

From Hubert Humphrey to Ronald Reagan, Gloria Steinem to Anita Bryant, Lee Iacocca to Ray Kroc, John Wayne to Farrah Fawcett, important politicians, activists, athletes, business leaders and entertainers are on “Donahue”. It became necessary to stop.

In addition to his popular talk show, phil pursued several other projects.

He partnered with Soviet journalist Vladimir Posner for an important television discussion series during the Cold War in the 1980s. The US-Soviet bridge featured simultaneous broadcasts from the United States and the Soviet Union, where studio audiences could ask each other questions. Donahue and Posner also co-hosted Posner/phil, a weekly roundtable on CNBC in the 1990s.

Donahue also co-directed the Oscar-nominated 2006 documentary “Body of War.”