Larry King, famous TV personality, dies after Covid 19 diagnosis

 

Larry King, the radio and television personality whose breezy and conversational interviews with celebrities and world leaders made him a broadcasting icon for nearly half a century, has died, his TV production company Ora Media said in a statement Saturday.

The statement said he had been receiving treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

It did not specify the cause of death, but King was recently hospitalized with Covid-19. King had a variety of medical issues in his life. He had Type 2 diabetes, survived several heart attacks, and underwent quintuple bypass surgery in 1987. He underwent surgery for lung cancer in 2017 and had a procedure for angina in 2019, CNN said.

King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants. His legendary broadcasting career began in radio, expanding to television when he became the host of “Larry King Live” on CNN from 1985 to 2011. It was one of CNN’s highest rated shows. It garnered him numerous awards including an Emmy, two Peabodys and 10 Cable Ace Awards. In recent years, he'd been active in independent productions.

“With the folksy personality of a Bensonhurst schmoozer, Mr. King interviewed an estimated 50,000 people of every imaginable persuasion and claim to fame — every president since Richard M. Nixon, world leaders, royalty, religious and business figures, crime and disaster victims, pundits, swindlers, ‘experts’ on U.F.O.s and paranormal phenomena, and untold hosts of idiosyncratic and insomniac telephone callers,” the New York Times said in an obit.

"We mourn the passing of our colleague Larry King," CNN President Jeff Zucker said in a statement. "The scrappy young man from Brooklyn had a history-making career spanning radio and television. His curiosity about the world propelled his award-winning career in broadcasting, but it was his generosity of spirit that drew the world to him.”