Phil Donahue, daytime talk show pioneer, dies at age 88

Phil Donahue, the celebrated daytime talk show host who pioneered the television staple, has died, his publicist confirmed to CBS News. He was 88.

Donahue died Sunday night surrounded by his wife, actor Marlo Thomas, and his sister, children and grandchildren, his publicist said in a statement.

He died peacefully after a long illness, the statement said, without providing additional details.

“I’m sure by now you’ve heard the very sad news that I lost my sweetheart last night, so I know you understand that I’ll be stepping away from this page for a while,” Thomas wrote on Instagram Monday afternoon alongside an old photo of her and Donahue on vacation together. “But I didn’t want to disappear without saying thank you for the beautiful messages of love and support that have been coming in all day, and for the wonderful and generous way that you’ve let Phil and me share our life adventure with you over the years.”

President Biden awarded Donahue the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year. The White House called “Donahue” one of the most influential television programs of its time.

“Phil Donahue broadcast the power of personal stories in living rooms all across America,” Mr. Biden said during May’s White House ceremony. “He helped change hearts and minds through honest and open dialogue. And over the course of a defining career in television and through thousands of daily conversations, Phil Donahue steered the nation’s discourse and spoke to our better angels.”

Donahue got his start in broadcasting in the 1950s, working for both TV and radio. He launched “The Phil Donahue Show” in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967 and it was syndicated nationally three years later.

He moved the show in 1974 from Ohio to Chicago. He stayed in the city for about a decade, including a few years using CBS Chicago’s studios as the base of operations for the renamed “Donahue” show.

In 1985, he moved the show to New York, and he was asked if he was worried Chicagoans would resent him for the move.

“I think maybe one of the reasons we’re hot in New York… is that we come from Chicago,” Donahue told the station.

In all, he had had what his publicist, Susie Arons, described as “a staggering 29-year run on the airwaves” totaling some 6,000 episodes, winning him 20 Emmy Awards, a Peabody and induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

With a live studio audience, Donahue focused his show on a single guest or topic, and he didn’t stray away from controversy. His first guest was atheist scholar Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and Arons noted that Donahue was the first TV host to feature a person who had AIDS in the early days of the epidemic.

“He had this natural curiosity, this intelligence and humor and Midwestern charm that sort of made him instantly likable by audiences,” People magazine senior editor Dave Quinn told CBS News on Monday. “… What Phil did that was so interesting is that he never shied away from talking about the things that Americans were too shy to often have those conversations themselves.”

As his audience grew, he interviewed some of the biggest names of the late 20th century, including Muhammad Ali, former President Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and Gloria Steinem. During the 1992 presidential election, Donahue broadcast a conversation between President George H.W. Bush and his challenger, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

“All the feminists somehow seemed to, sooner or later, show up on the ‘Donahue’ show,” Donahue told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in 2020. “And we were thrilled with that, because they were good guests,” including his wife.

Donahue met Thomas when she was a guest on his show in 1977.

“It really wasn’t an interview,” she told “Sunday Morning.” “And he said to me, ‘How come you’ve never married?’ I said, I just don’t believe it’s for me. It seems like it’s only a place for one-and-a-half persons, you know, the person that has the dream and the other person who supports the dream.”

The couple marked their 40th wedding anniversary in 2020 and wrote a book, “What Makes a Marriage Last: 40 Celebrated Couples Share with Us the Secrets to a Happy Life.”

“I always say,” Thomas said, “I’m so lucky I married a man who saw the ‘Donahue’ show every day!”

Donahue has been credited with paving the way in daytime TV for Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres to achieve success as well as Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer and others.

Donahue once said as a joke, “They’re all my illegitimate children.”