# Loni Anderson dies at 79 **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** celebrity-death\ **Created:** [August 3, 2025, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672 "2025-08-03T23:36:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/1 "2025-08-03T23:36:35Z")
Best known for WKRP in Cincinnati and married Burt Reynolds. I didn’t realize she was that old. Almost 40 when she appeared on the show. RIP > **[Popular 1980s actor Loni Anderson of the hit TV series 'WKRP in Cincinnati'...](https://abc7ny.com/post/loni-anderson-popular-1980s-actor-hit-tv-series-wkrp-cincinnati-dies-79/17421363/)** > > Loni Anderson, who played a struggling radio station's empowered receptionist on the hit TV comedy "WKRP in Cincinnati," died Sunday, just days before her 80th birthday. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/2 "2025-08-03T23:37:50Z")
As previously posted elsewhere, WRIP In Cincinnati. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/3 "2025-08-03T23:40:18Z")
Wouldn’t this fit Cafe? Loni was a popular actress in the 80’s. [65 imdb credits](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000756/?ref_=sr_t_1) ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/4 "2025-08-03T23:40:47Z")
Huh. I thought she died years ago. ---
**Author:** ![Moriarty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moriarty/32/49_2.png) [@Moriarty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moriarty)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/5 "2025-08-03T23:43:04Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > I thought she died years ago. Suzanne Somers died in 2023. That might be why. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/6 "2025-08-03T23:43:21Z")
Could be. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2025, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/7 "2025-08-03T23:47:53Z")
Loni and Suzanne were similarly typecast and were popular at the same time. Loni was in several tv movies and a couple movies with Burt Reynolds. She earned two Emmy nominations for WKRP. ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/8 "2025-08-04T00:01:17Z")
One of Loni’s first TV appearances was on a short-lived David Janssen series “Harry O.” She appeared in it with another 1970s icon, Farrah Fawcett. However. . . Loni’s scene is a distance shot, where she is waving to Farrah and Janssen. Farrah informs him that she’s the neighbor. She’s the only person in that short, so it’s very possible that she never met any of the other actors during the filming. Same with her appearance in “The Invisible Man” that same year (1975). She appears as a ghostly image and doesn’t interact with any of the other actors in real life. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/9 "2025-08-04T00:12:36Z")
I remember seeing her as a guest on _The Tonight Show_, during her run on _WRKP_. She talked with Johnny Carson about the fact that she was a natural brunette, and she showed a photo of her with her natural hair color – if it wasn’t this picture, it was something like it. [![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fl9c1vlWQAEThKf.jpg) ](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fl9c1vlWQAEThKf.jpg) When she first became an actress, she struggled to get roles – she’d been a working actress for over a decade before being cast on _WKRP_. Someone (maybe her agent, maybe a casting director; I don’t recall) told her that, with her natural hair color, she had an “ethnic” look to her, and suggested she go blonde, in hopes of getting the attention of casting directors. Clearly, it worked. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/10 "2025-08-04T00:28:59Z")
She’s looks a lot like Raquel Welch in that picture. Lots of similarities. She was only five years younger, also married, had kids, and divorced young, won beauty contests, and went through lots of minor roles as the sexy girl before breaking through. She was only 33, not near 40, when she got WKRP. The role was written as dumb blonde and she refused to play it that way. Smart, capable, and superior Jennifer was a thousand times better as a character. ---
**Author:** ![XOldiesJock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/ec9cab/32.png) [@XOldiesJock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XOldiesJock)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/11 "2025-08-04T01:08:09Z")
Sorry to hear she’s signed-off. No radio station I ever worked for had a receptionist who looked quite like “Jennifer,” though most were as smart as her character was. She may have been blonde, but she was sure not dumb! On the other hand, I met several Herb Tarleks along the way. FAR too many. Because the two guys who created it were actually former radio guys, WKRP had an exaggerated reality about it, take it from me. ---
**Author:** ![aceplace57](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aceplace57/32/3500_2.png) [@aceplace57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aceplace57)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/12 "2025-08-04T01:09:02Z")
Frank Bonner also died at 79. Herb Tarlek and Jennifer were my favorite characters on WKRP. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/13 "2025-08-04T01:55:29Z")
Aw, darn… sorry to see another of that brilliant cast go. > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Smart, capable, and superior Jennifer was a thousand times better as a character. Big Guy Carlson was never quite sure what he has paying her (more than any other station employee) for, but she kept earning it. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2025, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/14 "2025-08-04T02:01:00Z")
Back on June 16th, 2021. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2025, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/15 "2025-08-05T11:06:11Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Smart, capable, and superior Jennifer was a thousand times better as a character. And the highest paid employee at the station, who really ran everything for the bumbling Carlson. I don’t know anything about radio stations, but both my parents were professors, so I know a lot about academia, and I know that departments at universities were always really run by the main secretary. If you wanted anything done, that’s who you went to, not the department chair, who wasn’t as bumbling as Mr. Carlson, but could be an absent-minded professor, or someone who always had a paper due, and was more concerned about that, or might even be Dr. Sheldon Cooper. The department chair never knew your name, even if you’d had him in class, but the secretary did. The Jennifer character was brilliant. I loved her, and at the time, she was one of the few really smart and competent women on TV, at a time when most of the women of a hit show like MASH were just bad puns (Nurse Able) who rarely had faces, and in whose scrubs the doctors were scheming to get. I never knew Loni Anderson herself, and not the writers, was responsible for the way the character was written. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2025, 11:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/16 "2025-08-05T11:45:38Z")
The boss is the strategist. The secretary is the tactician. ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2025, 11:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/17 "2025-08-05T11:48:09Z")
Loni Anderson was extremely versatile. She was a capable, confident woman who could (and did) put down Herb Tarlek many times on WKRP, but I think where she truly shone was on an episode of “The Love Boat,” where she played both a glamorous movie star, and the mousy unattractive assistant to that star. As the star, she was haughty, with no time for the “little people,” but as the assistant, she shone at dealing with the “little people.” Of course, she was the same person in each role, and knew it, and so did we in the TV audience, but you’d think she was two different people. She was that good. Rest well, Loni. Rockthrow, West Virginia lost a favourite daughter in Jennifer, and the _Pacific Princess_ lost one of its most fascinating passengers. You’ve earned a rest. ---
**Author:** ![RivkahChaya](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rivkahchaya/32/8919_2.png) [@RivkahChaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RivkahChaya)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2025, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/18 "2025-08-05T11:53:41Z")
> [@Spoons](#): > > Of course, she was the same person in each role, and knew it, and so did we in the TV audience, but you’d think she was two different people. She was that good. I don’t think I’ve seen _The Love Boat_ since it’s original run, but one of my streaming services has it-- going to look that up tonight. ---
**Author:** ![Spoons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spoons/32/3141_2.png) [@Spoons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spoons)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2025, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/loni-anderson-dies-at-79/1021672/19 "2025-08-05T12:06:49Z")
Rivkah, I think it’s the “Lost and Found/The Understudy/Married Singles” episode. Not entirely sure. But you will find it, I’m sure.