R.I.P. Loni Anderson: ‘WKRP In Cincinnati,’ ‘Melrose Place’ Actress Dead At 79

Television star Loni Anderson, best known for her role in WKRP in Cincinnati, has passed away. She was 79.

Anderson’s publicist Cheryl J. Kagan confirmed her passing to Associated Press.

“We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our dear wife, mother and grandmother,” her family said. Anderson reportedly passed at a Los Angeles hospital Sunday, Aug. 3 after a “prolonged” illness, just days before what would have been her 80th birthday on Aug. 5.

Anderson became one of the biggest television stars of the ’70s and ’80s thanks to her breakout performance in the series WKRP In Cincinnati playing brilliant receptionist Jennifer Marlowe. She was nominated twice for an Emmy Award and three times for a Golden Globe for her turn as the high-heeled receptionist who kept the station running.

In a 2023 interview with Us, Anderson praised the role that helped cement her career.

“She was the smartest person in the room. She spoke seven languages and she took care of everybody like she was their mom, and yet she was a bombshell, so it made her so interesting,” she said, adding that she thinks Jennifer would be “running the show somewhere… She is definitely a CEO, because she really ran the station.”

Anderson reprised the role on The New WKRP in Cincinnati in 1991. She went on to star in The Jayne Mansfield Story, Stroker Ace, A Night at the Roxbury, and Melrose Place, to name a few.

Anderson also starred on The Merv Griffin Show, where she met and began dating Burt Reynolds in 1981. She and Reynolds became tabloid fixtures – and starred opposite each other in Stroker Ace – during their marriage before they later divorced in 1994. The couple share one child together, Quinton Anderson Reynolds.

“I think back to the beginning of our relationship, it was so, oh, gosh, tabloidy. We were just a spectacle all the time. And it was hard to have a relationship in that atmosphere. And somehow, we did it through many ups and downs,” she once told the AP.

Morgan Fairchild, Anderson’s Ladies of the ’80s: A Divas Christmas co-star, shared a photo from set in tribute to the late actress. “Memories of lovely Loni Anderson, one of the genuinely nicest ladies I’ve ever worked with, on set of our Christmas movie with Donna Mills. We had so much fun on this! She will be greatly missed,” Fairchild wrote on X.

The television star chronicled her life in the 1995 autobiography My Life in High Heels.

Anderson is survived by her recent husband, Bob Flick, who she married in 2008, as well as her children Quinton and Deidra Hoffman, and her grandchildren.