Phil Donahue dead: Daytime talk show host was 88

Phil Donahue, the groundbreaking daytime talk show host of “The Phil Donahue Show,” has died. He was 88.

He died Sunday “peacefully after a long illness,” his family said in a statement shared with The Times. “Today” broke the news of the host’s death. Donahue was a contributor to the NBC morning show.

Donahue was known for bringing the audience into the talk-show format, engaging with them just as he did with the notable and eclectic list of guests on the show, including anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, musical star Dolly Parton and groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor.

Dubbed “the king of daytime talk,” Donahue was the first to incorporate such audience participation into a talk show, typically during a full hour with a single guest.

“Just one guest per show? No band?” he remembered being routinely asked in his 1979 memoir, “Donahue: My Own Story.”

The format set “The Phil Donahue Show” apart from other interview shows of the 1960s and made it a trendsetter in daytime TV, where it was particularly popular with female audiences.

In a tribute shared on social media Monday, Oprah Winfrey reflected on Donahue’s legacy stating simply: “There wouldn’t have been an Oprah Show without Phil Donahue being the first to prove that daytime talk and women watching should be taken seriously.”

She added: “He was a pioneer. I’m glad I got to thank him for it. Rest in peace Phil.”

Later renamed “Donahue,” the program launched in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Donahue’s willingness to explore the hot-button social issues of the day emerged immediately, when he featured atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as his first guest. He would later air shows on feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection and civil rights, among hundreds of other topics.

The show would run nearly 30 years, through 1996. By then, as The Times reported, the landscape of daytime TV had radically changed, with a cacophony of competitors who turned Donahue’s once-daring openness about personal issues into “I Slept With My Mother’s Boyfriend.”

Once the undisputed ruler of daytime and a nine-time Emmy Award winner, Donahue dropped to No. 13 in the ratings during his last season on-air. After he lost a key New York outlet and KNBC-TV Channel 4 in Los Angeles announced it would not be renewing the show, he decided to quit rather than be canceled.

At the time, he said he had no idea what was next.

“When I walk out that door at the end of the last show, I have no professional commitments to anybody or any company,” Donahue said in an interview with The Times in May 1996 shortly before his last show aired. “Everyone around here is looking at me like I’m some kind of science project — ’How am I going to respond to not working every day?’ … I don’t want to sit in a rocker for the rest of my life.”

One area of interest, he said, was documentaries. “I’d like to be able to take the time to research and develop a story that reveals something about America,” he said at the time.

And he did just that.

In 2004, Donahue toured Washington’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he met Tomas Young, a young Kansan who enlisted in the Army not long after 9/11 to fight the war on terrorism. An insurgent’s bullet penetrated Young’s spine, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down; he became one of more than 13,000 American soldiers and Marines to return home badly wounded, many permanently disabled.

Donahue resolved to tell the story of Young’s struggle to recover his life and enlisted director Ellen Spiro, a documentarian who had made films for HBO and PBS. Along the way, their subject became involved in the growing antiwar movement, which reinforced the filmmakers’ decision to intersperse Young’s personal story with footage of the congressional votes and hearings that sent hundreds of thousands of young American men and women to war in Iraq.

The film, “Body of War,” debuted on the festival circuit in Toronto in 2007 to standing ovations and nearly universal critical acclaim.

Phillip John Donahue was born Dec. 21, 1935, part of a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland. They moved to Centerville, Ohio, when Donahue was a child, where he lived across the street from Erma Bombeck, the future humorist and syndicated columnist.

Donahue was in the first graduating class of St. Edward High School, a Catholic all-boys preparatory school in Lakewood, in 1953 and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in business administration in 1957. He later rebelled against, and left, the church, though he poignantly recalled in his book that “a little piece” of his faith would always be with him.

After a series of early jobs in radio and TV, Donahue was invited to move an earlier radio talk show to Dayton’s WLWD television station in 1967. It moved in 1974 to Chicago, where it stayed for years, then ended its run in in 1996 in New York, where Donahue was living with his wife, actor Marlo Thomas.

Donahue had previously been married to Marge Cooney, with whom he had five children. They divorced in 1975.

He met the “That Girl” star 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 the air.

“You are really fascinating,” Donahue told Thomas, grasping her hand.

“You are wonderful,” Thomas said back. “You are loving and generous, and you like women and it’s a pleasure, and whoever the woman in your life is, is very lucky.”

The two married in 1980.

Donahue received the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with 18 others in May. The accolade cited his work as one of the most influential television programs of its time.

In addition to Thomas, Donahue is survived by four children from his first marriage, Mary Rose, Kevin, Michael and Danny Donahue; a sister; and two grandchildren, according to the Washington Post. Another son from his first marriage, James, died in 2014.

The family requests donations be made to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital or the Phil Donahue/Notre Dame Scholarship Fund.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.