Successful national talk show host Phil Donahue, who entertained, challenged and informed two generations of daytime television viewers, died Sunday evening after a long illness. diversity confirmed. He was 88.

News of his death was first announced on the “Today” show Monday morning. “Groundbreaking television talk show journalist Phil Donahue died Sunday night at home surrounded by his wife of 44 years, Marlo Thomas, sister, children, grandchildren and beloved golden retriever Charlie,” his family said in a statement. “Donahue was 88 and died peacefully after a long illness.”

The groundbreaking, issue-driven “The Phil Donahue Show” went national in 1969, was renamed “Donahue” in 1974 and eventually reached more than 200 stations across the country. It ran until 1996, when the daytime talk show landscape had radically transformed into a tabloid circus and competitors like Oprah Winfrey had stolen away his female viewers. Although Donahue was not afraid to resort to sensationalist topics, his show was still fairly tame compared to the imitators like “Sally Jesse Raphael” and “Jerry Springer” that followed.

Controversy and hotly debated sociopolitical issues were not uncommon for the silver-haired Donahue, who gave his popular show a strong journalistic backbone and provided a stark contrast to the usual celebrity chatter and soap operas of daytime television.

In total, Donahue received nine Daytime Emmys and 21 nominations, as well as a Primetime Emmy for his special “Donahue and Kids.” (His other nighttime specials included the five-part series “Phil Donahue Examines the Human Animal,” which first aired in 1986.) In 1981, Donahue received a Peabody Award.

Donahue’s nonthreatening, fatherly image was key to his appeal, as was his rapport with the women in his studio audience. Another factor was his incisive interviewing style, which was forceful without being combative. Over the years he interviewed heads of state, politicians, feminists, Ku Klux Klan members, porn stars and ’60s radicals. He was the only talk show host to sign South African Nelson Mandela immediately after his release from prison. His show was so controversial that Newsweek once wrote, “It is sometimes suspected that Donahue’s idea of ​​the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who have had a child through artificial insemination.” And indeed, such a couple appeared on the show in 1979.

On his way to becoming the cultural standard of his time, Donahue also became rich: According to diversityIn the mid-1990s, he earned $20 million a year in salary, multimedia stocks, and other options.

Phillip John Donahue was born on December 21, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio. After his third year at Notre Dame, where he studied business, Donahue took a summer job at WNDU, the university’s local station, and worked his way up to announcer. After graduating with a BBA, he started as a summer fill-in announcer at KYW-AM TV, a television and radio station in Cleveland, and left, only to return shortly thereafter because he was dissatisfied with his job and was unable to break into full-time television journalism.

In 1958, he began working as program/news director at WABJ, a small radio station in Michigan, which led to a job at WHIO-AM-TV in Dayton, where he honed his journalistic skills and landed interviews with the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and Billie Sol Estes. In 1963, he also hosted a daily 90-minute radio talk show called “Conversation Piece,” which attracted a primarily female audience. But his efforts to land a job with national reach failed, and he gave up broadcasting in 1967 to work as a salesman for EF MacDonald, a private label company in Dayton.

Within a few months, however, he was back hosting a morning interview show on WLWD TV in Dayton, “The Phil Donahue Show.” Failing to attract prominent figures to town, Donahue turned this disadvantage to his advantage by interviewing only one person per show, covering only one subject and, most importantly, interacting extensively with the studio audience. His frequent visits to the audience and encouragement of participation quickly became the show’s trademark.

His first guest was Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist who had successfully argued against school prayer before the Supreme Court. The show was a huge hit with viewers. Donahue was soon tackling controversial topics such as premarital sex and homosexuality, as well as other social, political and lifestyle issues. He later visited the Ohio State Penitentiary and the Ohio Reformatory for Women and spent time studying prison life. He invited the president of General Motors to debate consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

The show was so successful in Dayton that in 1969, Avco Broadcasting Co. began to distribute it to its other stations across the country. Two years later, the show was popular with 44 stations, mostly in the Midwest. The show moved to the facilities of the WGN-TV station in Chicago and was renamed “Donahue” in 1974.

Multimedia Program Prods. bought “Donahue” in 1976, and by the end of the 1970s the show was airing on over 200 stations, mostly affiliates, and reaching 9 million viewers, the vast majority of them women. At the time, Donahue was earning $500,000 a year and a percentage of the show’s revenue. As Donahue’s popularity grew, his annual income rose to over $1 million, and he even signed a contract to appear regularly on the “Today Show” from 1979 to 1982, and then for a year on ABC’s late-night “The Last Word.”

In 1985, the show moved to New York and began broadcasting live (until then it had been broadcast live only in Chicago and on tape in most other locations). That same year, Donahue and his Soviet colleague Vladimir Pozner initiated satellite dialogues between American and Russian audiences in Leningrad. He later traveled to the Soviet Union, where he became the first American talk show host to be recorded in the communist country and the first Western journalist to visit Chernobyl after the nuclear accident. The two co-hosted the news and talk show Pozner/Donahue, which ran in syndication on CNBC from 1991 to 1994. During the 1992 primaries, he moderated a debate between future President Bill Clinton and one of his opponents, former California Governor Jerry Brown.

By the mid-1990s, with more than 6,000 shows under his belt, Donahue was becoming a victim of his own success. Other talk shows that were equally or more raunchy were popping up, and to keep up, Donahue had to constantly raise (or lower) the bar. His main competitor, Oprah Winfrey, was diluting his female base. Other shows, seeking to appeal to younger viewers, went even further in pursuing sensational topics. Slowly, he began to lose important markets until he and Multimedia quit in 1996.

In 2002-2003, Donahue briefly returned to television with an eponymous talk show on MSNBC, where he interviewed journalists on social and political issues. Viewership was far lower than that of “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox Network, with which the show competed, but it achieved the highest ratings of any cable network program at the time. Despite this, MSNBC canceled “Donahue” after six months, leading some observers to conclude that the network found the show undesirable given the political climate prevailing in the country at the time.

“Network management apparently did not like the host’s left-leaning politics, a claim reminiscent of a recently leaked internal memo that noted that Donahue’s politics would have been unacceptable to audiences in wartime.” diversity said at the time.

Oprah Winfrey praised Donahue in a September 2002 interview when she was considering doing an anti-war series on her own show, saying, “The bottom line is that we need you, Phil, because we need to be challenged by the voice of the opposition.”

In 2007, Donahue co-wrote, directed and produced the documentary Body of War with Ellen Spiro, an indictment of the Iraq War that follows a single injured soldier after his return from combat. diversity called it “a strong argument against hasty decisions, whether to join the military or to attack a country.”

Donahue maintained a television presence even after he no longer had his own program, appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Tavis Smiley,” “Real Time With Bill Maher,” “Hannity,” “The Piers Morgan Show” and “Moyers & Company.” In November 2010, Donahue appeared on an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” alongside fellow former talk show hosts Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake and Montel Williams.

He has also appeared in documentaries including William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe (2009), Good Riddance (2011) about Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Finding Vivian Maier (2013), and Unity (2014), among many other notable people.

Donahue was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 1993 and won an ATAS Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.

His survivors include Donahue’s second wife, Marlo Thomas, whom he married in 1980, and five children from his first marriage.