Phil Donahue, the long-time host of the trend-setting TV talk show The Phil Donahue Showdied on Sunday evening after a long illness surrounded by his family, including his long-time wife, actress Marlo Thomas. He was 88 years old.

His death was announced on The Today Show this morning. Today shared a statement from Donahue’s family. See the announcement below.

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Donahue has been called “a classic newspaper writer” who developed a format that was copied by others. Today The moderators pointed out that Donahue was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden just this summer.

Donahue was married to Thomas for more than 40 years. They met when the The girl Star met Donahue when she was a guest on his talk show.

The family statement reads: “Trailblazing television talk show journalist Phil Donahue died Sunday night at home surrounded by his wife of 44 years, Marlo Thomas, his sister, children, grandchildren and beloved golden retriever Charlie. Donahue was 88 and died peacefully after a long illness.”

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Donahue was born on December 21, 1935, in Cleveland and began a career as a radio journalist in the late 1950s, first in his hometown and then in Adrian, Michigan.

But it was his television work in Dayton, Ohio, that really launched not only Donahue’s career, but also the new and influential style of daytime talk TV. In 1959, he was hired as a television reporter at Dayton’s WHIO, where his insightful interviewing style was first noticed by the public and his bosses. Within four years, he also had a radio call-in show called Topics of conversation for the WHIO-affiliated radio station.

Within a few years, he had continued his talk show venture on television, hosting a business program and co-anchoring the evening news. In 1967, he was signed by a rival station in Dayton, WLWD, which offered him a morning interview show with a studio audience.

With a studio audience that treated Donahue with respect – the host walked through the seats and handed the microphone to viewers with questions for the guests – The Phil Donahue Show became a popular and beloved program item in the Dayton area. Donahue is considered one of the first women’s rights advocates, giving his predominantly female audience the opportunity to speak and ask questions on serious topics rather than the home economics topics on which so many daytime talkers focused.

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Unlike Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and numerous other daytime talkers, The Phil Donahue Show typically had one guest per episode to cover serious topics more thoroughly. Among its first, most frequent and most controversial guests was atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who provoked Midwestern audiences with her anti-religious views.

By 1969, the show was broadcast not only in Dayton but also in other Midwestern markets, and by 1971, it was broadcast in over 30 cities.

As his show’s reach and popularity grew, Donahue not only gained a larger audience and greater fame, but also major accolades: During his talk show’s run from 1967 to 1996, Donahue won nine Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Host (1977–1980, 1982–1983, 1985–1986, and 1988).

The growing popularity of the show prompted him to move in 1974, when he moved his show from Dayton to Chicago’s WGN, where The Phil Donahue Show was simply Donahue. Donahue, who moved production to New York City in 1985, eschewed the circus-like scream-fests that would mark the next stage in the evolution of daytime programming with hosts like Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake, and continued his warmer, if very inquisitive, style, an approach that lost some popularity in the ’90s but remained the gold standard for serious daytime television.

His normally friendly demeanor, however, did not mean that Donahue avoided sensitive topics. Quite the opposite. With a handheld microphone in hand and almost running from one audience member to the next, Donahue helped ensure that the day’s conversations addressed a wide range of issues and personalities that were controversial at the time and, in many cases, still are today. He gave voice to gay rights activists, anti-war protesters, pro- and anti-abortion rights supporters and opponents, the Ku Klux Klan, atheists, pedophiles within the clergy of the Catholic Church, the Club Kids of the 1990s, and feminists and anti-feminists.

In a particularly memorable episode in 1979, he defended a viewer who dared to criticize the dour Ayn Rand by calling the woman “rude” and a “hippie.”

“This is the kind of woman we have been trying to attract to our audience for a long time,” Donahue told the rudely dismissive Rand. Raising his voice, he said to the author, “Don’t be so sensitive!”

In 1977, actor Thomas appeared on Donahue’s show and the two developed an obvious rapport on camera and off. They married in 1980.

In 2002, Donahue hosted a new talk show on MSNBC, but found that his anti-war stance was at odds with the country’s generally positive attitude toward George W. Bush’s military actions in Iraq. His MSNBC show had low ratings and was soon canceled.

His later projects include the 2007 documentary Body of Warand, with Mrs Thomas, the book of 2020 What makes a marriage last: 40 famous couples reveal the secrets of a happy life.

Donahue received the Daytime Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1996. He received a Peabody Award in 1981 and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

Donahue’s Medal of Freedom biography noted: “At a time when daytime television was dominated by a banal mix of soap operas, game shows and musical variety shows, Donahue eschewed orchestras and strobe lights and instead used a single prop – a handheld microphone – and took over the airwaves with programs devoted to the most controversial issues of our time. And for the first time in television history, a television host invited the American public to become part of the national discussion, both in his studio and through viewers calling in from across the country. ‘Is the caller there?’ became a national catchphrase.”

His Medal of Freedom biography also noted some of the highlights of Donahue’s show: Milton Friedman unravelling “mysterious economics,” Nelson Mandela denouncing apartheid, Gloria Steinem ushering in “a new era of activist feminism,” and Muhammad Ali weighing in on race, religion and sports. Donahue was, the biography says, “the first television host to present a person with AIDS, when cases numbered only a few hundred.”

“Most important,” the biography continues, “Donahue recognized the unparalleled power of his medium and fought to ensure that his legions of viewers – whether sitting in his studio or calling in from home and asking questions – were part of the critical dialogue that brought people together. When consumer advocate Ralph Nader (author of Unsafe at any speed) came on the show to talk about auto safety, Donahue also brought along the recently resigned president of General Motors so viewers could hear the debate firsthand and decide for themselves exactly what was at stake when they got behind the wheel of the family station wagon.” In 1986, Donahue was the first Western journalist to visit the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the disaster that same year, and in 1992 he invited Bill Clinton and George HW Bush to the same episode “so they could talk to each other – and to the viewers – and try to put their differences into words.”

“After 29 years in syndication and five years in retirement, Donahue returned to television with a show on MSNBC,” the Medal of Freedom statement said. “Less than six months into the show, during the buildup to the Iraq War, he began inviting guests who condemned the planned U.S. invasion – including former U.S. generals. He was the first and only journalist at the time to open that discussion. Today, historians, the journalistic establishment and much of the American public have followed Donahue’s line of thinking and reject the Iraq War as a tragic mistake.”

He is survived by his wife Thomas, his children Michael, Daniel, Kevin and Mary Rose, and a sister. Another son, Jim, died in 2014 at the age of 51 from an aortic aneurysm.

Donahue’s family requests that donations be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital or the Phil Donahue/Notre Dame Scholarship Fund in lieu of flowers.

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