Larry King, Broadcaster Who Interviewed Thousands of World Leaders and Celebrities, Dies at 87

Larry King died on Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87. The announcement came from Ora Media, the television production company he founded, in a post on Twitter. Several media reports said he had been hospitalized with a COVID-19 infection.

The company's statement counted 63 years across radio, television and digital media, and credited him with many thousands of interviews, along with awards and global acclaim. For most viewers, the face of that career was "Larry King Live" on CNN, which ran from 1985 to 2010. He sat hunched over a desk, shirt sleeves rolled up, in owlish glasses. The show mixed interviews, political discussion, debates over current events and phone calls from viewers, and it became one of the network's prime attractions.

He was already an established radio talk-show host when he made his first CNN broadcast from Washington on June 3, 1985, five years after Ted Turner started the network. The show became one of CNN's highest rated. King left in 2010 after 25 years, as ratings were falling, but he stayed busy with his Ora TV show.

His guest list was long. It included U.S. presidents going back to Gerald Ford, and international figures such as PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. On the entertainment side it ran from Bob Hope to Snoop Dogg. He liked to reminisce about older performers such as Frank Sinatra and Arthur Godfrey. In 2006 he told a guest he had never searched the internet, asking, "What do you do - punch little buttons and things?" By 2012, though, he was online himself with "Larry King Now" on Ora TV, later on Hulu's streaming service, and on Twitter, where he promoted interviews and posted random thoughts such as his fondness for lime Jell-O.

Critics accused him, even in his prime, of doing little pre-interview research and lobbing softball questions to guests who could give self-promoting answers unchallenged. King conceded he did not do much research, saying it let him learn along with viewers. He also said he never wanted to be seen as a journalist. In 2007 he told the Hartford Courant that he saw himself as a conduit who asked the best questions he could, listened, followed up and left conclusions to the audience. Don Hewitt, creator of "60 Minutes," once told the Hollywood Reporter that King was never confrontational and seemed one of the happy ones.

He was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn on Nov. 19, 1933. He said he knew at age 5 that he wanted to be on the radio, and in 1957 he moved to Miami, which he had been told had a growing radio market. After odd jobs at a station, he was asked to fill in for an announcer who walked off. The station manager urged him to change Zeiger to King, as easier to pronounce and less ethnic.

His rise in Miami brought trouble. In 1971 he was arrested on a grand larceny complaint from financier Lou Wolfson, who had been in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission and allegedly paid King hoping to gain influence with the Nixon administration. The charge was dropped because the statute of limitations had expired, but the scandal kept him off the air for about three years. He did public relations work for a Louisiana racetrack until WIOD in Miami hired him. In 1978 the Mutual radio network gave him a national audience, and the move to Washington led to CNN.

His health was a recurring thread. He had a heart attack and bypass surgery in 1987 and started the Larry King Cardiac Foundation a year later. He had surgery in 2007 to clear a blocked artery, was treated for prostate cancer in 2010, and said in 2017 he had been treated for lung cancer. He married eight times to seven women, most recently singer Shawn Southwick, 26 years his junior. He had five children, two of whom died in 2020.