Loni Anderson, ‘WKRP’s’ Not-So-Dumb Blonde, Dies at 79

Loni Anderson, the platinum bombshell whose performance on “WKRP in Cincinnati” turned the stereotype of the dumb blonde on its head in the ’70s and ’80s, died Sunday in L.A.

According to her publicist, Cheryl Kagan, Anderson had endured a “prolonged illness.”

She was two days shy of her 80th birthday.

Anderson was born August 5, 1945, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

She began acting on TV with appearances on the shows “S.W.A.T.,” “Phyllis,” and “Police Woman” (all 1975), “Barnaby Jones” (1976), “The Bob Newhart Show” (1977), and a fortuitous appearance on “Three’s Company” in 1978 that caught the eyes of her future employers at “WKRP in Cincinnati.”

Having lost the Suzanne Somers role of Chrissy Snow on “Three’s Company” in 1976, she won the role for which she would become famous, Jennifer Marlowe, appearing on 89 episodes of the edgy comedy set at a radio station.

Voluptuous and always high-heeled (her 1995 memoir was cheekily entitled “My Life in High Heels”), Anderson’s Jennifer was smart as a whip, running circles around the station’s on-the-make men and rattling off one-liners like Eve Arden while oozing Jayne Mansfield.

She even played the latter in the 1980 TV movie “The Jayne Mansfield Story.”

During her run on “WKRP,” Anderson was twice nominated for the Emmy, becoming a household name and the subject of a series of swimsuit posters that flew out of malls nationwide. She was so in demand she was the only star who booked passage on “The Love Boat” and went directly to “Fantasy Island,” in a classic crossover of the shows in 1980.

Showing some of Jennifer Marlowe’s smarts, Anderson wore the same swimsuit from one of her hot-selling posters for most of this “Love Boat” voyage.

She next appeared in the TV movies “Sizzle” (1981) as a Prohibition-era gangster, “Country Gold” as a down-home crooner, a high-priced “My Mother’s Secret Life” (1984) as a high-priced sex worker, and played a real-life ill-fated ’30s actress in “White Hot: The Mysterious Murder of Thelma Todd” (1991).

She worked with Burt Reynolds in the flop movie “Stroker Ace” (1983), played herself in Steve Martin’s “The Lonely Guy” (1984), was the voice of Flo in the animated classic “All Dogs Go to Heaven” (1989), and was at her most over-the-top entertaining in a bit in “A Night at the Roxbury” (1998).

As for television, where she shone, Loni never again landed a lasting series, but did appear with Lynda Carter in “Partners in Crime” (1984) and was a regular on “Easy Street” (1986-1987), “Nurses” (1993-1994), “The Mullets” (2003-2004), and “My Sister Is So Gay” (2016-2020), all of which were short-lived.

In 2006, she played Candy Spelling on Tori Spelling’s VH1 series “So NoTORIous.”

Perhaps more famous than any of her appearances was her tumultuous time as movie icon Burt Reynolds’ second wife. Burt, her third husband, was allegedly emotionally and physically abusive with her. They accused each other of infidelity, and he accused her of spending too much of his money, tossing her out of their Florida home.

Their 1993 divorce sold countless gossip magazines and took its toll on them both. By 1995, she was ready to talk, and told an interviewer Reynolds was erratic with alimony and support payments for their child, admitting they’d never spoken since he served her with papers.

Blaming Reynolds’ violence toward her on painkillers, she said, “Burt shoved me all around the room, then threw me to the floor and opened the drawer and got out a loaded gun. He handed me the gun and told me to shoot myself and do us all a favor. I was terrified. Burt always said no one would ever believe me because he was Mr. Wonderful and the world loved him.”

Since 2010, she made very few acting appearances, but they included the TV series “Baby Daddy” (2016), the TV movie “Love You More” (2017), and her last-ever work on television, 2023’s “Ladies of the ’80s: A Divas Christmas” with Donna Mills, Morgan Fairchild, Linda Gray and Nicollette Sheridan.

Anderson, who was a popular and frequent guest at autograph shows for many years, is survived by her fourth husband, Bob Flick, of 17 years; by her daughter Deidra from her first marriage; and by her son Quinton from her marriage to Reynolds, who died at 82 in 2018.