Phil Donahue, the renowned TV talk show host, died Sunday evening surrounded by his loved ones, his family said in a statement shared with NBC’s “Today” show. He was 88.
Donahue “passed away peacefully following a long illness,” the statement reads.
In May, Donahue was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, for his contributions to the TV industry.
“Phil Donahue broadcast the power of personal stories in living rooms all across America,” President Joe Biden said during the ceremony. “He helped change hearts and minds through honest and open dialogue.”
Donahue, who hailed from Cleveland, started his career in radio before launching his famous TV show.
His namesake show, which ran for 29 years, was the first daytime TV show to include live input from the audience, and was one of the popular programs at the time. The show addressed hot-button topics like abortion and civil rights, among other issues.
Donahue received a total of 20 Emmy Awards. He also got a Peabody Award in 1980.
Following the end of his talk show in 1996, he was hired by MSNBC in 2002 to host a prime-time show, which was canceled within a year. While the network attributed its decision to end the program to poor ratings, a leaked internal memo described his show “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda,” because Donahue was against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to The Guardian.
While his show trailed the programs airing on CNN and Fox News during his time slot, Donahue garnered a larger audience than any other show on MSNBC at the time, The New York Times reported.
Media mogul Oprah Winfrey has credited Donahue with paving the way for her show’s success.
“If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey show,” Winfrey wrote in 2002. “He was the first to acknowledge that women are interested in more than mascara tips and cake recipes — that we’re intelligent, we’re concerned about the world around us, and we want the best possible lives for ourselves.”
In an interview with People magazine published in May, Donahue said he “occasionally” missed his old job.
“Sometimes I’ll shout my question to a guest on the screen and hope they’ll somehow hear me,” he said. “But to be honest, even though the medium has changed a bit — the sets are fancier, the productions are slicker, and the hosts are thankfully more diverse — all of the talk shows still cleave to the one thing that laid at the foundation of the 7,000 episodes I taped, and that’s curiosity.”
Donahue is survived by his wife, Marlo Thomas, and his five children from his earlier marriage with Marge Cooney.
Thomas married Donahue in 1980. She was living in Los Angeles when the two met, while Donahue hosted his show from Chicago at the time.
Speaking to HuffPost earlier this year, Thomas talked about the couple’s decision to move to New York to accommodate both of their jobs.
“You know, people thought that was so startling that a guy would move his show and his kids so that he could be with a woman that he wanted to marry in a city where they both could work,” Thomas said. “Now, he could have said, ‘No, I can’t do that I have a show.’ And that, I would have been in a really bad place, because I wouldn’t move to Chicago because there was no job for me there.”
“So it was really important that right away, I saw that he cared as much about my work as he cared about his own,” she added.
Paige Skinner contributed reporting.
This story has been updated to include additional information about MSNBC’s cancellation of Donahue’s prime-time show.
