Born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger on Nov. 19, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, King was the son of Jewish immigrants Jennie (Glitz) and Edward Zeiger, who ran a bar and grill in Brooklyn.
King’s career in media began in 1957 when he took a job as a disc jockey at WAHR-AM in Miami doing a night-time interview show. By the early 1960s, King moved to a larger Miami station and started a column for the Miami Herald, becoming a local celebrity himself.
In 1971, King was arrested in Miami on charges of grand larceny. Although the charges were dismissed the following year, King was not re-hired by the station or newspaper, prompting him to work as a freelance journalist in Louisiana.
King would then return to Miami in 1978 to the same station that employed him at the time of his arrest. The same year, “The Larry King Show” launched as a syndicated late-night coast-to-coast radio call-in show. King quickly rose to prominence, and within five years, his show spread from 28 cities to 118 cities. The show won a Peabody Award in 1982.
From 1985 through 2010, King became a nightly fixture on CNN for his show “Larry King Live,” which was CNN’s most-watched program. King was arguably the network’s biggest star.
In 2011, King announced his retirement but ultimately kept working until his death, hosting “Larry King Now.”
Over his illustrious career, King conducted an estimated 50,000 on-air interviews with guests ranging from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Madonna, Paul McCartney and many others.
“I’ve interviewed everybody once,” he wrote in his 2011 book, “Truth Be Told.” “How did I miss Bruce Springsteen?”
King was married eight times to seven wives, earning him a reputation as a womanizer. He divorced his seventh wife, Shawn King, after 22 years of marriage in 2019. He had five children, but Andy and Chaia, who were conceived with his third wife, Playboy bunny Alene Akins, died within weeks of each other in 2020, at 65 and 51, respectively.
King is survived by his remaining three children – sons Larry King Jr., 58, Chance King, 21, and Cannon King, 20.
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