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Vale: Phil Donahue

Pioneering US talk host Phil Donahue, host of The Phil Donahue Show, has died.

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Pioneering US talk host Phil Donahue, host of The Phil Donahue Show, has died aged 88.

He died at home on Sunday night following a long illness, surrounded by family, including his wife of 44 years, Marlo Thomas.

The Phil Donahue Show, also titled as Donahue, ran for twenty-nine seasons from 1967 to 1996 addressing issues and topics which impacted modern America with Donahue’s trademark balance and audience participation.

Variety notes Donahue’s nonthreatening, paternal image was key to his appeal, as was his rapport with the females in his studio audience. Another factor was his penetrating interviewing style, which was forceful without being belligerent. Over the years he interviewed heads of state, politicians, feminists, Ku Klux Klan members, porn stars and ’60s radicals.

He was the only talkshow host to land South Africa’s Nelson Mandela right after his release from prison. So contentious was his program that Newsweek once wrote “one sometimes suspects that Donahue’s idea of the perfect guest is an interracial lesbian couple who have had a child by artificial insemination.” And in fact, such a couple appeared on the show in 1979.

Indeed Donahue brought wider education and acceptance to LGBT topics (including to an audience of youth) helping them to have a public and most personal face -much of this took place through the darkest days of the HIV / AIDS epidemic under a Reagan government.

The range of topics spanned social, political and lifestyle issues, syndicated to 200 stations across America, and internationally, including Networks Seven and 10 in Australia.

By the mid-’90s, other talkshows such as Jerry Springer competed with salacious topics, while Oprah Winfrey was dominating the female audience. None of them could match his balance, inquisitiveness nor sense of justice. Oprah has also once observed without the Donahue show there would have been no Oprah.

Donahue was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1993 and won an Lifetime Achievement award at the Emmys in 1996.

12 Responses

  1. Back in uni days, I spent many, many, many hours in front of Phil Donahue while I was ‘studying’ – he was a talkshow host extraordinaire and seemed like a lovely man. My mother and sister went to a taping of his show in the nineties, and I envy them to this day.

  2. I still proudly have on display a framed photo of myself and Phil after the taping of one his shows in the early 1990s. At that stage it was recorded at the NBC Rockefeller Centre studios in New York City. If I recall, the topic of that day’s show was the state of American education. Phil showed that you didn’t need to be a lunatic ratbag to have sustained success on the TV talk show circuit. He was a class act.
    Vale Phil Donahue.

  5. In the second half of this video from Maine Public Library is Samantha Smith (1972-85), the American girl who wrote to Yuri Andropov, as a guest on “Donahue”.

    youtube.com/watch?v=AoQ_Lji5V70

  6. .. I imported his show for Bruce Gordon in the early eighties and was given special permission by the Commonwealth Film Censor to make the censorship classification decisions, but my favorite moment was when I had to arrange a press interview with Phil to launch the series … due to the time difference I had to call him at home and the phone was answered by Marlo Thomas, having been a fan of That Girl, it was far more exciting talking to her than Phil!!!!

  7. A great guy. I remember his long running series well. What an amazing couple he and Marlo Thomas made. Phil definitely made a huge impression on the landscape.

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