Phil Donahue, a staple of American daytime TV and trailblazer with The Phil Donahue Show, died Sunday night at 88.
His wife of 44 years, actress Marlo Thomas, along with his sister, children, grandchildren, and golden retriever Charlie were all by his side at the time of his passing, according to the family's statement to NBC. Donahue’s family said the longtime host had been battling an unspecified long-term illness.
The groundbreaking Phil Donahue Show was on air for 29 years beginning in 1970, and was a key program on daytime television, often credited with creating the format viewers are accustomed to today. It was the first show to have a studio audience and to discuss topics that were considered taboo during the time period like child abuse and race relations.
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Donahue won 20 Emmys, and at the height of his show's popularity on network WGN, 8 million viewers would tune in daily. He was considered by many to be the “father of the modern talk show.”
The show went off the air in 1996, after which the former host told People he missed his career “occasionally” and still watched daytime TV on a regular basis, reveling in the differences—and similarities—between the new shows and the one he pioneered. “Sometimes I’ll shout my question to a guest on the screen and hope they’ll somehow hear me,” he told the magazine of his viewing habits.
“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,” he said. “I still believe that, despite our differences, we’re all part of this sprawling global family, and we just need to get to know each other, so that we can share the world together.”
This past May, Donahue was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden.
