The actor Loni Anderson, who has died aged 79, after a long illness, gained her greatest recognition on screen in the American sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, playing Jennifer Marlowe, the intelligent, cool and collected receptionist at a flagging Ohio radio station. Hugh Wilson, the former Atlanta advertising executive who created the programme, which ran for four series between 1978 and 1982, said he picked Anderson for her looks. But, he added, she insisted she would not portray Jennifer as a “dumb blonde”.
“I don’t want to play this part because I think she’s just here to deliver messages and is window dressing,” she told Wilson. “Let’s make her look like Lana Turner and be the smartest person in the room.” Wilson also made the receptionist the station’s highest-paid employee, who refuses to make coffee, take dictation or type letters.
“I think women loved the fact I was sexy and smart,” Anderson said in 2011. “I know it sounds crazy to people today, but in 1978, when we came on, not many women were doing both in comedy.”
Jennifer, a model of calm and efficiency surrounded by incompetence, was most often seen deflecting unwanted business calls for Arthur “Big Guy” Carlson (played by Gordon Jump), the station’s bumbling general manager, and the attentions of Herb Tarlek (Frank Bonner), the boorish sales manager. Anderson’s performance earned her nominations for two Emmy awards and three Golden Globes.
She continued the image of an empowered woman, albeit a slightly naïve one, with the role of Pembrook Feeney, a marketing and PR guru, in the 1983 film Stroker Ace, which starred Burt Reynolds as an arrogant racing driver. The action comedy was deemed a flop by the public and critics, leading Reynolds to say that it was responsible for his career nosediving.
The off-screen romance between Anderson and Reynolds led in 1988 to their marriage, his second, her third. The ceremony, in a purpose-built chapel at Reynolds’s Florida ranch, was top-secret, although pictures were released of Anderson wearing a canary-yellow, seven-carat diamond ring. “I feel like Cinderella,” she said. “I married Prince Charming.”
But an acrimonious divorce followed six years later, with Reynolds saying: “She bought everything in triplicate, from everyday dresses to jewellery, to china and linens.” He added that he gave her a platinum American Express card with a $45,000 credit limit that she “maxed out in half an hour”. Both claimed infidelity by the other.
A year after the divorce, Anderson accused Reynolds of physical abuse on at least a dozen occasions, allegedly when he was under the influence of painkiller drugs. She later said he failed to make some child support payments on time for Quinton, the son they had adopted (she won primary custody). In 2015, he wrote a cheque for $154,520 as a final settlement.
Despite the apparent bitterness, when Reynolds died in 2018, Anderson acknowledged him as “a big part of my life for 12 years” and said that she and Quinton “will miss him and his great laugh”.
Anderson was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Maxine (nee Kallin), a model, and Klaydon Anderson, an environmental chemist. She grew up nearby in Roseville, where she attended Alexander Ramsey high school and won beauty pageants. She studied art at Minnesota University and married Bruce Hasselberg in 1964. Her divorce two years later tied in with her acting debut, uncredited, in the film Nevada Smith, a western starring Steve McQueen.
While earning a living as a high school teacher, she gained experience performing with community theatre groups around Minnesota and Minneapolis in the early 1970s. She played Tzeitel, the eldest daughter, in Fiddler on the Roof and secured the leading role of Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s play Born Yesterday by donning a blond wig over her natural dark hair. “Would you have cast me if you knew I wasn’t a blonde?” she asked the director after earning a standing ovation on her first night, then taking the wig off.
In 1975, a year after marrying Ross Bickell, Anderson moved to Los Angeles, had breast reduction surgery and dyed her hair platinum blond. “The lighter my hair got, the more work I got,” she said.
Her early TV roles were small, one-off parts in popular series such as S.W.A.T., The Invisible Man, Harry O, and Police Woman (all 1975), The Bob Newhart Show (1977), The Incredible Hulk and Three’s Company (both 1978).
Halfway through WKRP in Cincinnati, Anderson took the title role in the TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980), with a then unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Hollywood star’s second husband, Mickey Hargitay, a bodybuilder.
Her television career continued as Sydney Kovak in Partners in Crime (1984, titled Fifty/Fifty outside the US), a series teaming her and Lynda Carter as widows running a detective agency formerly owned by the murdered man who had been husband to both of them.
Anderson was back in sitcom to play LK McGuire, a rich widow in a Beverly Hills mansion, in Easy Street (1986-87) before reprising the role of Jennifer Marlowe for two episodes (1991-92) of The New WKRP in Cincinatti.
She played Teri Carson, who tries to gain revenge on a judge when her daughter fails to win a beauty pageant, in the fourth series of the soap Melrose Place (1996) and continued to pop up on television in guest roles until she was cast as Frances, the cocktail-drinking mother, in another sitcom, My Sister Is So Gay (2016-20).
Anderson’s marriage to Bickell ended in divorce in 1981. She married for a fourth time, to Bob Flick, in 2008. He survives her, along with Quinton and a daughter, Deidra, from her first marriage.
• Loni Kaye Anderson, actor, born 5 August 1945; died 3 August 2025
