The 2010 TIME 100

Your remarkable achievements include successes on Broadway, in the movies and in publishing. Your TV show? Oh, yes, there's that. It is a blockbuster for our time, in a very competitive marketplace. I ought to know.

When our program signed on the air in 1967, we occupied a family room of soaps and game shows, and we are proud to have rearranged the furniture of daytime TV. We could not have known that almost 20 years later, your program would remodel the whole house.

You have carved out a world of huge crowds, where your audience members get cars and the President calls you back! And throughout this fabulous fairyland story, you have held to a noble purpose: you leave a legacy of responsible TV stewardship, a program that brought light to dark places and made us laugh, often at ourselves.

There is no match for you in media history. You are not only hot; you are cool: the Dream Girl for millions of ambitious young women whom you've inspired all over the world. You are a once-in-a-century woman. I salute you.

Donahue hosted The Phil Donahue Show for 29 years

TIME 100 Social-Networking Index: 2,907,504