Loni Anderson, who played the platinum blonde receptionist on the screwball comedy WKRP in Cincinnati in the late 1970s and early ’80s and later became a tabloid mainstay during her contentious divorce from actor Burt Reynolds, has died at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 79.
Her death, just days before her 80th birthday, was confirmed by Cheryl Kagan, her publicist, who cited an unspecified prolonged illness.
Loni Kaye Anderson was born on August 5, 1945, in St Paul, Minnesota, the daughter of Klaydon Carl Anderson, a chemist, and Maxine Kallin, a model.
As a young woman, Anderson’s fresh face, dimples and big, sparkling eyes epitomised the American beauty standards of her time. She got her start in acting on television shows in the mid-1970s.
Her big break came in 1978 when she was cast as Jennifer Marlowe, a receptionist, on WKRP in Cincinnati.
The show, which aired on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was about an easy-listening local radio station in Cincinnati that switched to a rock format.
Her role earned her three Golden Globe nominations as well as two Emmy Award nominations. She later appeared in two episodes of a sequel, The New WKRP in Cincinnati, which aired from 1991 to 1993.
Anderson’s seemingly ditsy, bombshell character was anything but, and her performance as Jennifer showed that looks and smarts could go together.
“I was against being like a blonde window dressing person, so I made my feelings known,” she said on Australian television in 2017. “And as we know, Jennifer was the smartest person in the room.”
“She just turned into a great groundbreaking kind of character for women to be glamorous and smart,” Anderson added.
Her trademark blond locks were not her natural hair colour, and she initially had conflicted feelings about them.
Anderson had been a brunette for most of her life, including during her early acting career, and worried that she would not be taken seriously as an actress if she dyed her hair.
“I was very much on the fence about it,” she said in the interview.
She entered into a relationship with actor Burt Reynolds, who would become her third husband, in 1982 when they were filming Stroker Ace, a comedy surrounding car racing.
Anderson played a “rather sweet, Marilyn Monroe-like turn as a virginal public relations woman” who was the love interest of Reynolds’ character, according to The New York Times’ review of the film.
The couple married in 1988 and adopted a son, Quinton Reynolds.
The union ended in 1993, in one of the most acrimonious splits Hollywood had seen, and one that would serve as tabloid filler for decades to come, with both Reynolds and Anderson jabbing at each other over the years in interviews.
In 2015, the gossip website TMZ reported that Reynolds had finally paid off his settlement to Anderson.
“It was one of the longest and nastiest divorces in Hollywood history,” the website wrote.
“The truth is,” Reynolds wrote in a memoir released that same year, “I never did like her.”
The two seemed to have patched things up before Reynolds’ death in 2018.
“We were friends first and friends last,” Anderson said in 2019. “It’s time to move on.”
In 2008, Anderson married her fourth husband, musician Bob Flick, who was a founding member of the 1960s folk group the Brothers Four.
The pair had met more than four decades before, as part of a fan photo opportunity for Flick’s band on May 17, 1963. Exactly 45 years later, they cut into a wedding cake decorated with that first photo of them.
In addition to Quinton Reynolds and Flick, Anderson is survived by her daughter, Deidra Hoffman, her stepson, Adam Flick, two granddaughters and two step-grandchildren.
Over the decades, Anderson amassed more than 60 acting credits.
In 1980, Anderson starred in the biographical drama and made-for-TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story about the actor of the same name opposite a young Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hungarian actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay.
She continued working well into her 70s. In 2023, she appeared in the Lifetime movie Ladies of the ’80s: A Divas Christmas, which follows five soap opera actresses who reunite to shoot a Christmas episode.
Anderson remained true to her early television persona well into her later years, still donning a well-kept head of bleach-blond hair.
At the premiere for the 2023 film, she reflected on acting in the 1970s and ′80s as opposed to more recent times.
Young actors in the 21st century could be “chameleon-like,” she said, whereas in her generation, “everybody had an image and you stuck with your image”.
She added: “We were kind of put into our image. Into our Loni-suit.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
Written by: Claire Moses
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