Actress Loni Anderson, best known for her breakout role on the CBS sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati” as well as her tempestuous marriage to Burt Reynolds, died at the age of 79 on Sunday.
No cause of death was given, but Anderson publicist Cheryl J. Kagan told The Associated Press she passed away in a Los Angeles hospital after what was described as a “prolonged illness.”
“We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our dear wife, mother and grandmother,” said the Anderson family in a statement.
While it only ran for four seasons between 1978 and 1982, “WKRP in Cincinnati” — involving a struggling radio station in the Ohio city attempting to reinvent itself via a rock format — brought Anderson both fame and critical plaudits as receptionist Jennifer Marlowe.
Breaking: Actress Loni Anderson of the hit 1980s TV series ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ has died https://t.co/OES8dqNqwG
— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) August 3, 2025
Anderson’s Marlowe broke mold by playing against her stereotypical blonde bombshell looks, instead serving as the station’s resident cynic and the most intelligent member of the crew.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted, this was at Anderson’s urging; she liked the concept of “WKRP” but thought the original role as a dim sex siren was trite, “so I refused.”
“I went in and sat on my little soapbox and said, ‘I don’t want to play this part because she’s just here to deliver messages and is window dressing,’” she said about her discussion with series creator Hugh Wilson.
WKRP in Cincinnati has had a cult following for years – were you a fan?
“Then Hugh said, ‘Well, how would you do it?’ … He said, ‘Let’s make her look like Lana Turner and be the smartest person in the room.’”
As THR noted, that’s what happened: “With Jennifer refusing to take dictation, type letters or make coffee as the opposite of the ‘dumb blond’ stereotype that blanketed TV back then, Anderson starred on all but one of the show’s 90 episodes during its four-season run through April 1982.”
She also starred as the titular character in “The Jayne Mansfield Story,” a 1980 television biopic in which a then relatively unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger played her husband.
Born on Aug. 5, 1945 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a chemist father and model mother, she was the runner-up in the 1964 Miss Minnesota pageant while studying at the University of Minnesota.
She eloped with another student, Bruce Hasselberg, but despite having one child the marriage quickly ended. She found steady work in Hollywood before “WKRP,” and it was on the set of “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1981 that she met Reynolds. The two began dating a year later and were married in 1988, when she was 41 and he was 52.
“We all cried,” said actor Robby Benson, a guest at the Florida wedding. “It couldn’t have been lovelier. They looked like the perfect couple, the kind you see on the top of a wedding cake, only bigger.”
The marriage, alas, didn’t quite meet those standards.
The two didn’t work together often — the most notable example of the two being on screen together was co-starring in the critically and commercially reviled 1983 stock-car racing parody “Stroker Ace,” although the two also voiced canines in the 1989 animated film “All Dogs Go to Heaven” — and as the two landed fewer roles on both TV and film, things were getting ugly behind the scenes as well.
“Reynolds served her with divorce papers in June 1993 and began publicly bashing her, saying she had cheated on him and calling her unfit to raise their son, Quinton, whom they adopted weeks after his 1988 birth. She said he was the one having an affair and that he was hooked on painkillers and had abused her,” The Hollywood Reporter noted.
Reynolds portrayed Anderson as a gold-digger: “I gave her a platinum American Express card with a $45,000 credit limit. She maxed it out in half an hour,” he said in his memoir, according to People.
Reynolds, meanwhile, countered that Reynolds’ alleged battering was brought on by his abuse of opioids prescribed for pain: “The physical abuse I always blamed on the drugs,” she said during a 1995 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, which said she detailed “beatings that left her bruised all over her body, except her face.”
“Burt always said no one would ever believe me because he was Mr. Wonderful and the world loved him,” she said at the time, adding that while she was watching the O.J. Simpson trial, she could “empathize with everything I heard about Nicole Brown Simpson.”
“You really have no idea the seductiveness and the charm and with what feeling this insidious thing happens to you,” she said about why abused spouses stay.
The whole mess turned into a tabloid feeding frenzy, something Reynolds would gripe about publicly.
“I’m very happy that we were able to sell papers for a year and a half,” he said in a 1994 interview. “Why that doesn’t translate into money, I don’t know. … I’m glad America is curious about us.”
However, the divorce would financially ruin Reynolds, leading him to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1996; he would only be financially free of his ties to Anderson when he wrote her a final check for $154,520 in 2015.
Anderson noted the two would occasionally meet with their son and spoke at his 2018 funeral, however. After the tabloid controversy died down, she would go on to have notable roles in shows like “Melrose Place” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”
She’s survived by her fourth husband, musician Bob Flick, as well as her two children, two grandchildren, a stepson, and two step-grandchildren.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
