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Pioneering daytime talk show host was 88
Phil Donahue, whose groundbreaking daytime talk show launched an indelible genre of television that brought success Oprah WinfreyMontel Williams, Ellen DeGeneres and many others have passed away. He was 88.
NBC’s ‘Today’ showciting family members, said Donahue died Sunday after a long illness.
Dubbed “the king of daytime conversations,” Donahue was the first to include audience participation on a talk show, usually for an entire hour with a single guest.
“Only one guest per show? No tape?” he recalled being asked routinely in his 1979 memoir, “Donahue, My Own Story.”
The format distinguished “The Phil Donahue Show” from other interview shows of the 1960s and made it a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was especially popular with female audiences.
The program was later renamed ‘Donahue’ and launched in 1967 in Dayton, Ohio. Donahue’s willingness to explore current social issues was immediately evident when he hosted atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as his first guest. He would later broadcast shows about feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection and civil rights, among hundreds of other topics.
The show aired in 1970 and was on national television for the next 26 years, a total of twenty years. Emmy Awards for the show and for Donahue as host, as well as a Peabody for Donahue in 1980. In May, President Joe Biden spoke awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Donahuewho was credited as the pioneer of the daytime talk show.
The show featured radio-style calls, which Donahue greeted with his signature, “Is the caller there?”
The show’s final episode aired in 1996 in New York, where Donahue lived with his wife, actor Marlo Thomas. He met Thomas, the 1960s “That Girl” star 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 air.
“You’re really fascinating,” Donahue said to Thomas, taking her hand. “You’re great,” Thomas said back. “You are loving and generous, and you love women and it is a pleasure, and whoever the woman in your life is, she is very lucky.”
The two had been 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 due to low ratings.
He was born Phillip John Donahue on December 21, 1935, to a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland.
Donahue was in the first graduating class of St. Edward High School, an all-boys Catholic preparatory school in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, in 1953. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1957 with a degree in business administration. He later graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in business administration. rebelled against the church and left the church, although he poignantly recalled in his book that “a little piece” of his faith would always stay with him.
After a series of early jobs in radio and TV, Donahue was invited in 1967 to move a previous radio talk show to Dayton’s WLWD television station. It moved to Chicago in 1974, where it remained for many years, then ended its run in New York.
The show featured discussions with spiritual leaders, doctors, housewives, activists and entertainers or politicians who might be passing through the city. A frequent guest was his neighbor, Erma Bombeck, the humorist and syndicated columnist.
He said it was a happy coincidence to use the show’s winning formula.
“It took perhaps three years for any of us to begin to understand that our program was something special,” Donahue wrote. “The style of the show was developed not by genius but by necessity. The famous talk show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. … The result was improvisation.”
That gave the show a freedom that endured as it rose to No. 1 status in its class.
With an amiable style and a mop of salt-and-pepper hair, Donahue boxed with Muhammed Ali. He played football with Alice Cooper. His guests gave cooking classes, taught break dancing and, more controversially, described mansharing, mistressing, lesbian motherhood or – with the help of collected videos that caused shows to be banned in certain cities – how natural childbirth, abortions or reverse vasectomies worked. .
A stop on ‘Donahue’ became a must for major 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 collaborated with Soviet journalist Vladimir Posner on a groundbreaking television discussion series during the Cold War in the 1980s. The US-Soviet bridge allowed simultaneous broadcasts from the United States and the Soviet Union, where the studio audience could ask each other questions. Donahue and Posner also co-hosted a weekly issues roundtable, Posner/Donahue, on CNBC in the 1990s.
Donahue also co-directed the 2006 Oscar-nominated documentary “Body of War.”
This story corrects the capitalization in the title of Donahue’s book.
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