Phil Donahue, whose pioneering 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. NBC’s Today show, citing family members, said Donahue died Sunday after a long illness.
Dubbed “the king of daytime talk,” Donahue was the first to incorporate audience participation in a talk show, typically during a full hour with a single guest. Phil Donahue hosts his television show in New York in 1993. Credit: AP “Just one guest per show? No band?” he remembered being routinely asked in his 1979 memoir, Donahue, My Own Story .
The 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 particularly popular with female audiences. Later renamed Donahue , the program launched in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Donahue’s willingness to explore the hot-button social issues of the day 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. Phil Donahue speaks with Judith Exner, one-time mistress of the late President John F. Kennedy.
Credit: AP The show was syndicated in 1970 and ran on national television for the next 26 years, racking up 20 Emmy Awards for the show and for Donahue as host. In May, President Joe Biden awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Donahue, who was cited as a pioneer of the daytime talk show. 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. Donahue had five children, four sons and a daughter, from a previous marriage. Donahue returned briefly to television in 2002, hosting another Donahue show on MSNBC.
The network cancelled it after six months, citing ratings — although a later leaked email showed it was about politics. Democratic presidential hopeful Gov. Bill Clinton speaks on Donahue in 1992.
Credit: AP He was born Phillip John Donahue on Dec. 21, 1935, part of a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland. After a series of early jobs in radio and TV, Donahue was invited to move an earlier radio talk show to television.
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.
“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.
” That lent a freedom to the show that persisted as it grew to No. 1 status in its class. With an amiable style and a head of salt-and-pepper hair, Donahue boxed with Muhammad Ali.
He played football with Alice Cooper. His guests gave cooking lessons, taught break dancing and, more controversially, described “mansharing,” being a mistress, lesbian motherhood or — with the help of gathered video that got shows banned in certain cities — how natural childbirth, abortion or reverse vasectomies worked. A stop on “Donahue” became a must for important politicians, activists, athletes, business leaders and entertainers, from Hubert Humphrey to Ronald Reagan, Gloria Steinem to Anita Bryant, Lee Iacocca to Ray Kroc, John Wayne to Farrah Fawcett.
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. AP.
