Lawrence Harvey Zeiger was born on November 19, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Edna and Edward Zeiger, both Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father died when Larry was nine, and his mother raised him and his brother in difficult circumstances in Bensonhurst. From childhood, he was consumed by radio — he would listen for hours and practiced announcing into hairbrushes and toy microphones. He attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn (where he was a classmate of Sandy Koufax), graduated in 1951, and worked various jobs in New York while dreaming of breaking into radio. In 1957, he moved to Miami on the advice of friends, and through persistence and the assistance of a supportive local broadcaster, landed a slot at WAHR radio in Miami Beach — changing his last name to King at the station manager's suggestion because Zeiger sounded 'too Jewish.'
Larry King built his broadcasting career in Miami through the late 1950s and 1960s — radio, then television — interrupted by a serious personal crisis: a 1971 grand larceny charge related to money stolen from a business partner (charges were eventually dropped), which cost him his jobs and drove him into personal and financial difficulty for several years. He returned to broadcasting in 1975, working for a Mutual Broadcasting System radio program that eventually became the Larry King Show — a late-night radio call-in program broadcast nationally from 1978 to 1994 that reached an audience of millions and established his interviewing style: the open question, the genuine curiosity, the refusal to be confrontational, the willingness to let the subject lead the conversation.
Larry King Live premiered on CNN on June 3, 1985, and ran for 25 years — until December 16, 2010 — becoming CNN's longest-running and most-watched program. He conducted more than 50,000 interviews across his career, with virtually every significant public figure of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His style was explicitly non-confrontational — he was criticized by some journalists for not pressing guests harder — and explicitly open: the open-ended questions that let subjects define their own territory, the genuine interest in what they had to say rather than what he wanted to confirm. Presidents, prime ministers, celebrities, athletes, business leaders, criminals, survivors: all sat across from King, and many said they had their most revealing conversations in his format.
Larry King's personal life included eight marriages to seven women — his marriage to Shawn Southwick (1997-2021) was the longest. He had multiple serious health crises: a 1987 heart attack that led him to establish the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, a 1998 cancer surgery, and subsequent cardiovascular issues. He died on January 23, 2021, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, at age 87, of sepsis complications — a few months after his final separation from Shawn Southwick and during the COVID-19 pandemic. His death was widely mourned, with tributes from world leaders and entertainers who had sat across from him acknowledging that he had created something genuinely rare in broadcasting: the space for a completely unguarded conversation, in public, with someone who was purely, genuinely interested in what you had to say.
