Sally Jessy Raphael Celebrates 90th Birthday Brunch (Exclusive)

Sally Jessy Raphael is 90!

The daytime talk show icon celebrated her 90th birthday, which falls on Feb. 25, with loved ones over the weekend, telling PEOPLE what it feels like to enjoy the milestone moment.

“I had a wonderful birthday brunch this weekend with some of my favorite friends and family,” Raphael shares.

“They kept saying, ‘We can’t believe you’re 90!’ I told them to stop reminding me, because I certainly don’t feel it!” she adds with a laugh. “Now I’m off on a girls’ trip to Paris to continue celebrating!” 

In a photo from her brunch celebration, the unforgettable television personality poses with her two grandsons, Max, 29, and Kyle, 23.

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Raphael was the first female to host an audience-participation, issue-drive talk show — predating Oprah Winfrey by nearly three years.

The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, later shortened to Sally, began in 1983, covering human interest subjects and hard-hitting news items, but it devolved in its later years into daily stories about feuding relationships or sexual exploits in order to compete with the shock tactics dominating the competition in the 1990s.

In a 2016 episode of Oprah: Where Are They Now?, Raphael explained how unhappy she was about the shift in content.

“The last years of doing those Maury Povich/Jerry Springer shows? I hated them,” she said. “I was betrayed by some of the producers into doing that. Come to think of it, I should have fought harder for what I knew what right — what I knew that I didn’t want to do.”

The host spent nearly two decades on air as host of the syndicated talk show. She made an appearance on daytime TV last year, as a guest on Sherri Shepherd’s Sherri in May 2024.

Raphael proved herself to be as feisty as ever, ribbing a former Sally show staffer — who is now an executive producer on Sherri — for her height, and commiserating with Shepherd about their own diminutive statures.

When Shepherd noted that Raphael still holds staff reunions decades after her show went off the air, the veteran host joked that it was because “we like to drink!”

“Well, there has to be a reason for a reunion,” she quipped.