Donahue’s willingness to explore the hot-button social issues of the day emerged immediately, In 1967, he featured an atheist as his first guest.
Phil Donahue, whose pioneering daytime talk show launched an indelible television genre that brought success to Oprah Winfrey, Montel Williams, Ellen DeGeneres and many others, has died. He was 88.Dubbed “the king of daytime talk,” Donahue was the first to incorporate audience participation in a talk show, typically during a full hour with a single guest.
The show included radio-style call-ins, which Donahue greeted with his signature, “is the caller there?”The show’s last episode aired in 1996 in New York, where Donahue was living with his wife, actor Marlo Thomas. He met Thomas, thestar of the 1960s who was a household name at the time and would later become a regular onDonahue had five children, four sons and a daughter, from a previous marriage.show on MSNBC.
After a series of early jobs in radio and TV, Donahue was invited to move an earlier radio talk show to television. The show featured discussions with spiritual leaders, doctors, homemakers, activists and entertainers or politicians who might be passing through town.“It may have been a full three years before any of us began to understand that our program was something special,” Donahue wrote. “The show’s style had developed not by genius but by necessity. The familiar talk-show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. ... The result was improvisation.
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