Inside Sally Jessy Raphael’s Exciting Life and World Travels at Age 90

Sally Jessy Raphael embraced turning 90 years old in 2025 by traveling the world with her closest friends.

More than 20 years after the cancellation of The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, the TV legend seemed busier than ever while visiting hot spots in France and Italy in honor of her milestone birthday in February 2025.

Raphael invited her fans — who she lovingly refers to as her “Raphaelites” — along for vacation through Italy in September of that year, as she toured Tuscany’s famed Livorno Cathedral and checked out the ruins in Rome.

When she wasn’t visiting historic architecture, the Daytime Emmy Award winner found some technology in Rome that might seem like a relic by today’s standards.

“Bet you didn’t think pay phones still existed… but I found one here in Rome,” she hilariously announced to her Instagram followers.

Earlier in the year, Raphael went with two of her closest friends to her “favorite city” of Paris to revisit some of her “old haunts” in honor of turning 90.

“I won’t tell you what they are because then they’d be everybody’s old haunts,” she joked to People in May. “But we had a very good time. We went to two or three museums and not much shopping. I was with two women. Actually, I should have gone with a man because it’s romantic, but I went with two women. So it was good.”

In that same interview, Raphael spoke about defying people’s expectations for what being 90 years old actually means.

“It’s really interesting being 90 because if you dye your hair and you don’t have any veins in your legs, then people say you look young,” she said. “And that’s always nice that people say, although why they think looking young when you can claim 90 is beyond me, but they think it’s a compliment.”

The former talk show host went on, “I think that it has to do with the word ‘cute.’ You’re cute when you’re young, and then for a long time, you’re not cute. And then when you get to be 80 or 90, you’re cute again. People always say, ‘That cute old lady,’ so I guess I’m cute again.”

Raphael was a mainstay of daytime TV for nearly 20 years before walking away from The Sally Jessy Raphael Show in May 2002. While Sally tackled social issues like racism and grief in its early years, the daytime talk show embraced the Trash TV format made popular by Jerry Springer by the time Raphael hung up her microphone.

“The last years of doing those Maury Povich/Jerry Springer shows? I hated them,” she admitted in 2016. “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 was right — what I knew that I didn’t want to do.”

Of course, the host still wears her signature red glasses in social media posts from time to time. According to Raphael, her iconic fashion accessory came about for a very practical reason early on in her career.

“I couldn’t see the teleprompter,” Raphael explained in 2010. “So I saw an ad that said, ‘We do a Pap smear and give you red glasses.'”

When the medical office apparently tried to upsell Raphael on an expensive pair of frames at her appointment, she stuck to her guns.

“They were going to trade me up [to a better pair],” she recalled. “I said: ‘You’re not going to trade me up. I don’t have that kind of money.’ [The red frames were] all they had for $19.95.”

Away from the screen, Raphael was married to her first husband, Andrew Vladimir, from 1956 to 1963 and later to her manager, Karl Soderlund, from 1963 until his death in 2020. Soderlund and Raphael shared four children.

Raphael acknowledged the first anniversary of Soderlund’s death in August 2021 with a loving tribute via Facebook.

“Visiting my late husband Karl on the first anniversary of his passing,” she captioned a photo of her late husband’s gravestone. “They say time heals all wounds, but I miss him more and more each day.”

These days, Raphael still makes regular media appearances, in addition to her world travels. Her signature wit was fully evident in August 2025 in a series of comedic mini-essays for New York Magazine about her favorite household products.

Explaining her love of black Sharpie pens, she opined: “As a New Yorker, I have a lot of black clothes and black purses. They all have signs of wear on the corners. So I use a black permanent Sharpie. I use it for all my purses, and I use it for the television when it looks like the pixel is worn out. I use it for everything.”

“I don’t drink and I don’t smoke. So, Cherry Coke Zero is my upper,” she confessed about zero-sugar soda. “When everybody is ordering cocktails and wine and a dirty martini, I have Cherry Coke Zero.”

Raphael admitted, “And I guess it’s not good for you. But you know what? When I asked my doctor, he said, ‘Sally, you’re 90 years old. If you drink soda and it hurts your liver or your kidneys, what difference does it make?’ There comes a time in your life when you can’t eat for health. So that’s why I drink Cherry Coke Zero, and when they don’t have it at a bar, I make them put maraschino cherry juice in a normal Coke.”

Raphael’s social media followers can hopefully expect plenty of globe-trotting vacation photos and many more Cherry Coke Zeroes in the years to come.