Larry King was born as Lawrence Harvey Zeiger.1)
On November 19, 1933, he was born.2)
He passed away on January 23, 2021.3)
He was a television broadcaster, radio host, and paid spokesman in the United States.4)
His work has been honored with two Peabodys, one Emmy, and ten Cable ACE Awards.5)
In the 1950s and 1960s, King worked as a local Florida journalist and radio interviewer. 6)
He rose to notoriety as the presenter of The Larry King Show beginning in 1978. This was a 24-hour call-in radio show carried on the Mutual Broadcasting System.7)
From 1985 through 2010, he was the anchor of CNN's nightly interview show Larry King Live. He presented Larry King Now on Hulu and RT America from 2012 until 2020.8)
He kept hosting Politicking with Larry King. From 2013 till his death in 2021, this was a weekly political conversation program that ran on the same two stations.9)
He was the younger of two children born to Jennie (Gitlitz), a textile worker from Vilnius, Lithuania, and Aaron Zeiger, a restaurant owner and defense-plant worker from Kolomyia, Austria-Hungary.10)
King attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, a public high school. 11)
King's father died of a heart attack at the age of 44. As a result, he, his mother, and his brother were placed on welfare.12)
Following his heart attack in 1987, King established the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, which paid for life-saving cardiac operations for patients who could not otherwise afford them.13)
King hosted Chabad's 30th annual “To Life” telethon in Los Angeles on August 30, 2010.14)
He made a donation to the Beverly Hills 9/11 Memorial Garden, and his name is engraved on the memorial.15)
On The Joan Rivers Show on September 10, 1990, Rivers questioned King which Miss America contender was “the ugliest.” “Miss Pennsylvania,” King said. She was one of the ten finalists, and she gave a fantastic ventriloquist routine… “The dummy was more attractive.” King served as a judge at the pageant on September 8, 1990. Later, King sent Miss Pennsylvania, Marla Wynne, a dozen long-stemmed flowers and an apology telegram.16)
King was one of 34 celebrities that signed an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1997. This letter was published in the International Herald Tribune as a newspaper advertising protesting the persecution of Scientologists in Germany, equating it to the Nazis' abuse of Jews in the 1930s. Dustin Hoffman and Goldie Hawn were among those who signed.17)
King was married eight times to seven different women.18)
At the age of 19, he married his high school love, Freda Miller. That union terminated the next year, allegedly at the request of their parents, who had the marriage annulled.19)
Later, King was temporarily married to Annette Kaye, with whom he had a son, Larry Jr., in November 1961. Larry Jr. did not meet King until he was in his forties.20)
In 1961, in one of the magazine's named nightclubs, King married his third wife, Alene Akins, a Playboy Bunny. Andy, Akins' son, was adopted by King in 1962. The next year, the couple divorced.21)
Mary Francis “Mickey” Stuphin, King's fourth wife, divorced him in 1963.22)
In 1969, he remarried Akins, with whom he had a second child, Chaia. In 1972, the couple divorced for the second time.23)
Dove Books released Daddy Day, Daughter Day, a book authored by King and Chaia, in 1997. It is aimed for young children and relates each of their stories about his divorce from Akins.24)
On September 25, 1976, King married his fifth wife, Sharon Lepore, a mathematics instructor and production assistant. In 1983, the couple divorced.25)
King met Julie Alexander, a businesswoman, in 1989 and proposed to her on their first date, August 1, 1989. On October 7, 1989, the two married in Washington, D.C., and Alexander became King's sixth wife. The pair did, however, reside in different places, with Alexander in Philadelphia and King in Washington, D.C., where he worked. They separated in 1990 and divorced in 1992.26)
After five weeks of dating, he proposed to actress Deanna Lund in 1995. They never married.27)
In 1997, he married his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, a singer, actress, and TV personality born in 1959. They married in King's hospital room in Los Angeles three days before he underwent heart surgery to clear a blocked blood artery. Chance, born in March 1999, and Cannon, born in May 2000, were the couple's two children.28)
He was Danny Southwick's stepfather in the Arena Football League.29)
Southwick quipped on King and Southwick's 10th anniversary in September 2007 that she was “the only [wife] to have lasted into the two digits”. Larry and Shawn King divorced in 2010, but later reunited. On August 20, 2019, they filed for divorce once more.30)