Phil Donahue, whose groundbreaking daytime talk show launched an unforgettable television genre that brought success to Oprah Winfrey, Montel Williams, Ellen DeGeneres and many others, has died. He was 88 years old.
The NBC program “Today” reported, citing family members, that Donahue died on Sunday after a long illness.
Donahue, the “King of the Daytime Talk Shows,” was the first to involve viewers in a talk show, usually for an entire hour with a single guest.
“Only one guest per show? No band?” he recalled being asked regularly in his 1979 memoir, “Donahue, My Own Story.”
With its format, “The Phil Donahue Show” was clearly different from other interview shows of the 1960s and became a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was particularly popular with female audiences.
The show was later renamed “Donahue” and launched in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Donahue’s willingness to tackle the hot-button social issues of the day was immediately evident when he invited atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as his first guest. He later broadcast programs on feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection and civil rights, as well as hundreds of other topics.
The show was syndicated in 1970 and ran on national television for the next 26 years, earning the show and Donahue 20 Emmy Awards as host, and Donahue received a Peabody in 1980. In May, President Joe Biden awarded Donahue, who has been called a pioneer of daytime talk shows, the Medal of Freedom.
The show featured radio-style calls, which Donahue greeted with his signature question, “Is the caller there?”
The show’s final episode aired in 1996 in New York, where Donahue lived with his wife, actress Marlo Thomas. He met Thomas, the 1960s “That Girl” star who was a household name at the time and later a regular on “Friends,” when she appeared on his show in 1977.
He later said it was love at first sight and they had a hard time hiding it on the show.
“You are truly fascinating,” Donahue said to Thomas, taking her hand. “You are wonderful,” Thomas replied. “You are loving and generous, and you like women, and it is a pleasure, and whoever the woman is in your life, she is very lucky.”
The two had been married since 1980. Donahue had five children from a previous marriage, four sons and a daughter.
Donahue briefly returned to television in 2002, hosting another “Donahue” show on MSNBC. The network canceled it after six months because ratings were too low.
He was born Phillip John Donahue on December 21, 1935, into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland. When Donahue was a child, they moved to Centerville, Ohio, where he lived across the street from Erma Bombeck, who later became a humorist and columnist.
Donahue was a 1953 graduate of St. Edward High School, a Catholic boys’ school in Lakewood, and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a business degree in 1957. He later rebelled against the church and left it, but wrote in his book that “a little piece” of his faith would always stay with him.
After a series of early jobs in radio and television, Donahue was invited to move a former radio talk show to Dayton television station WLWD in 1967. It moved to Chicago in 1974, where it remained for years before ending up in New York.
The show featured conversations with spiritual leaders, doctors, housewives, activists and entertainers or politicians who happened to be in town. He said the show’s formula for success was a happy accident.
“It may have taken three full years before any of us realized that our program was special,” Donahue wrote. “The style of the show had evolved not by genius but by necessity. The well-known talk show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. … The result was improvisation.”
This gave the show a freedom that continued even as it rose to number 1 in its class.
With his personable style and greying hair, Donahue boxed with Muhammad Ali. He played football with Alice Cooper. His guests gave cooking classes, taught breakdancing and, more controversially, talked about “mansharing”, life as a mistress, lesbian motherhood or – with the help of collected video material that led to broadcasts being banned in some cities – how natural births, abortions or reverse vasectomies work.
A stop on the Donahue became a must for major politicians, activists, athletes, business leaders and entertainers, from Hubert Humphrey to Ronald Reagan, from Gloria Steinem to Anita Bryant, from Lee Iacocca to Ray Kroc, from John Wayne to Farrah Fawcett.
Outside of his famous talk show, Donahue pursued several other projects.
During the Cold War in the 1980s, he collaborated with Soviet journalist Vladimir Posner on a groundbreaking television discussion series. The US-Soviet Bridge offered simultaneous broadcasts from the United States and the Soviet Union, allowing studio audiences to ask each other questions. Donahue and Posner also co-hosted a weekly roundtable discussion show, Posner/Donahue, on CNBC in the 1990s.
Donahue also co-directed the 2006 Oscar-nominated documentary film “Body of War.”
