Sally Jessy Raphael

Sally Jessy Raphael, born Sally Lowenthal on February 25, 1935, in Easton, Pennsylvania, is an American retired television and radio talk show host who appeared on Broadway in 2000 in The Rocky Horror Show. She took the professional surname Raphael from her mother's maiden name and adopted Jessy, drawn from her father's family, as a distinguishing middle name.

Raphael grew up partly in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where her father, Jesse Lowenthal, worked in the rum exporting business and her mother, Zelda Lowenthal, operated an art gallery. She also spent time in Scarsdale, New York, during her teenage years, when she participated in a program at White Plains AM radio station WFAS that allowed junior high school students to read news on the air. She graduated from Easton Area High School and later attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan before earning her degree from Columbia University in Manhattan. She studied acting under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in Manhattan. She has a younger brother, Steven Lowenthal.

After graduating from Columbia, Raphael worked as a news correspondent covering Central America for both the Associated Press and United Press International, with her Puerto Rican heritage, connections, and bilingual fluency in English and Spanish contributing to her hiring. She accumulated early media experience in Puerto Rico working in both radio and television, including hosting a television cooking show. While working in radio there, she met Karl Soderlund, the general manager of a radio station that hired her, who became her second husband and later her manager. After Soderlund lost his position, the two relocated to Miami, where Raphael worked as a radio announcer and developed a friendship with journalist and talk show host Larry King. Her radio work across Puerto Rico and the United States encompassed roles as a disc jockey, news reporter, and celebrity interviewer.

In the early 1980s, Raphael was asked to host a call-in advice program on WMCA in Lower Manhattan. Her radio call-in advice show, distributed by NBC Talknet, ran from 1981 to 1987 after producer Maurice Tunick gave her a one-hour trial on NBC affiliate WRC in Washington, D.C., in August 1981. The show eventually aired on more than 200 radio stations. Talk show host Phil Donahue, who heard her radio program and admired her rapport with audiences, encouraged her transition to television. Producer Burt Dubrow gave her a guest hosting opportunity on his talk show, and by mid-October 1983 she had been given her own program, The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, on KSDK-TV in St. Louis. The show, later shortened to Sally, ran in first-run syndication from October 17, 1983, to May 24, 2002, a span of nearly nineteen years. Raphael celebrated her 3,500th episode in early 1998. In 2002, Talkers Magazine named her among the 25 Greatest Radio Talk Show Hosts of all time, ranking her fifth, and among the 25 Greatest Television Talk Show Hosts of all time, ranking her eleventh, making her one of only three personalities to appear on both lists.

Raphael became widely recognized for her oversized red-framed glasses, a trademark that originated at her first broadcast news job when, with five minutes before airtime, she purchased the only pair of reading glasses she could afford at a nearby store. Though station managers objected to the frames, audience response was positive and she continued wearing the style throughout her career. In 1991, she and her talk show appeared in a cameo in the Paramount film The Addams Family. In 1989, she played herself in an episode of the television series The Equalizer titled "Making of a Martyr." In 1993, she offered to induct conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh into the Radio Hall of Fame after he was voted in, but used her induction speech to speak out against the vote. On November 10, 2010, she appeared as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show alongside former talk show hosts Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake, and Montel Williams.

From approximately 2005 to 2008, Raphael hosted a daily radio program called Sally Jessy Raphael on Talknet, previously known as Sally JR's Open House, which aired on the Internet, in syndication on local AM stations across New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest, and on XM Satellite Radio's America's Talk channel beginning November 19, 2007. The show's flagship station was WVIE in Baltimore. She ended the program on July 7, 2008. In 2014, she hosted the Logo web series Sally Jessy Rides. In 2024, she appeared in a cameo in an episode of Everybody Still Hates Chris.