Longtime TV talk show host Phil Donahue died on Sunday night following a long illness, his family said. He was 88.
Donahue, a television pioneer who introduced the world to the modern format of daytime talk shows that featured audience participation, died at home surround by his family, including his wife of 44 years, Marlo Thomas.
Dubbed “the king of daytime talk,” Phil Donahue was the first to incorporate audience participation in a talk show, typically during a full hour with a single guest.
The Phil Donahue Show became a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was particularly popular with female audiences, and spurred a new category of talk shows that would dive into social issues and current events.
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Later renamed Donahue, the program launched in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Donahue’s willingness to explore the hot-button issues emerged immediately, when he featured atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as his first guest. He would later air shows on feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection and civil rights, among hundreds of other topics.
The show featured discussions with spiritual leaders, doctors, homemakers, activists and entertainers or politicians who might be passing through town. He said striking upon the show’s winning formula was a happy accident.
“It may have been a full three years before any of us began to understand that our program was something special,” Donahue wrote in his 1979 memoir, Donahue, my own story. “The show’s style had developed not by genius but by necessity. The familiar talk-show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. …The result was improvisation.”
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 Thomas. He met Thomas, the That Girl star of the 1960s who was a household name at the time, when she appeared on his show in 1977. He later said it was love at first sight.
The two had been married since 1980. Donahue had five children, four sons and a daughter, from a previous marriage. He returned briefly to television in 2002, hosting another Donahue show on MSNBC. The station cancelled it after six months, citing low ratings.
Outside of his famous talk show, Donahue pursued several other projects.
He partnered with Soviet journalist Vladimir Posner for a groundbreaking television discussion series during the Cold War in the 1980s. The U.S.-Soviet Bridge featured simultaneous broadcasts from the United States and the Soviet Union, where studio audiences could ask questions of one another. Donahue and Posner also co-hosted a weekly issues roundtable, Posner/Donahue, on CNBC in the 1990s.
Donahue also co-directed the 2006 documentary Body of War, which was nominated for an Oscar.
President Joe Biden awarded Donahue the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May. The medal is the country’s highest civilian honour, presented to “individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors,” according to the White House.
The cause of Donahue’s death was not revealed.
— With files from The Associated Press
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