Brian Niemietz
New York Daily News
(TNS)
Phil Donahue, a groundbreaking daytime TV talk show host, has died. He was 88.
His family told Today the long-time television fixture died Sunday night surrounded by loved ones following a long illness of an undisclosed nature. They included his wife, actor Marlo Thomas, whom he married in 1980, three years after they met during a taping of his program “Donahue.”
The Donahue family asked fans wanting to make donations in his honor to contribute to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital or to the scholarship fund Donahue established at the University of Notre Dame, from where he graduated in 1957.
The Ohio native was a television trailblazer credited with first establishing a format in which actively engaging audience members was essential to the program. He was on the air for nearly 30 years before stepping away from “Donahue” in 1996.
Fellow TV host Oprah Winfrey once praised Donahue for “opening the door … wide enough for me to walk through” and said her career might not have happened if not for the vision of her 20-time Emmy Award winning predecessor.
Besides Winfrey, talk show hosts including Morton Downey Jr. and Geraldo Rivera followed in his footsteps in the late 1980s, followed by the likes of Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer and Maury Povich.
Rivera posted on social media he was deeply saddened by Donahue’s death and called him “a hero, a talk show pioneer who inspired me to try my hand at the genre he invented.”
When President Joe Biden awarded Donahue the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May, the White House called his talk show “one of the most influential televisions programs of its time.”
Donahue briefly returned to television in 2002 with an MSNBC current events program that lasted less than a year.
His career began in radio and television in 1957 with a production assistant job at KYW in Cleveland. He would soon find his way to the microphone. In 1967, he launched “The Phil Donahue Show” on a local Dayton station. That program became nationally syndicated in 1970 and began taping in Chicago. Donahue came to New York City in 1984 when his show moved to 30 Rockefeller Center, where he also contributed to “The Today Show” from 1979 to 1988.
He recorded nearly 7,000 hour-long episodes of his talk show before broadcasting his farewell on Sept. 13, 1996.
Tributes poured in Monday morning following news of Donahue’s death.
“One of the true trail-blazing icons of American television,” host Piers Morgan posted to X. “Such a clever, interesting man.”
ABC News anchor Deborah Roberts remembered Donahue as a catalyst for her work.
“Like so many journalists, he inspired me during my career,” she posted on social media. “What a life!”
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