Early life
King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger on November 19, 1933, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.1 His parents, Aaron Zeiger and Jennie Gitlitz, were Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Belarus: his father ran a restaurant and his mother worked in the garment industry.1 Aaron Zeiger died of a heart attack when Larry was nine years old, leaving the family to rely on government welfare.1 King attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, where his academic focus suffered after his father's death.1
In his early twenties, King left New York for Florida with ambitions of breaking into radio. He began working at WAHR (later WMBM) in Miami Beach on May 1, 1957, earning $50 a week.1 Minutes before his first on-air appearance the station manager objected to the name "Zeiger" as unsuited to broadcasting, and King adopted his professional name on the spot, choosing "King" from an advertisement in a newspaper.1
Career
King spent his first two decades in broadcasting in South Florida, working as a disc jockey, talk-show host, and freelance writer. He developed his signature conversational interview style through on-location street interviews and years of local radio and television work in the Miami market.1
In 1978 he began hosting The Larry King Show on the Mutual Broadcasting System, a nightly national radio call-in program that ran until 1994.1 The show brought King to a nationwide audience for the first time and established the open-telephone format he would use throughout his career.
In 1985, CNN launched Larry King Live, a nightly television talk show that became one of the longest-running programs in cable news history. King hosted it for 25 years and more than 6,000 episodes until his retirement from the program in December 2010.1 The show was a frequent platform for presidential candidates, heads of state, and major public figures; King interviewed every sitting American president from Gerald Ford onward.1 By his own account he conducted more than 60,000 interviews over the course of his career, a figure that earned him a place in the Guinness World Records for the longest-running talk show hosted by the same person on the same network in the same time slot.1
After leaving CNN, King co-founded Ora TV (2012) and launched Larry King Now and Politicking with Larry King as streaming programs, continuing to interview newsmakers into his eighties.1
Beyond his interview work, King built a modest acting and voice-acting career. He played himself or a radio announcer figure in The Exorcist III (1990) and its extended cut The Exorcist III: Legion (2016), appeared in two episodes each of Murphy Brown (1990, 1996) and The Simpsons (1991, 1994), and provided voice work for the Shrek animated franchise across three films: Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007), and Shrek Forever After (2010). He also appeared in The Power of Few (2013).1
King received two Peabody Awards, one for radio (1982) and one for television (1992). He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1989 and the Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 1992, and won ten CableACE Awards during the run of Larry King Live.1
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters (1984)
Larry King made a cameo appearance as himself in Ghostbusters (1984), appearing in Chapter 14 ("Welcome Aboard").2 He is shown at his studio conducting his nightly national call-in program, The Larry King Show, with the topic of the evening being ghosts and ghostbusting. In the scene as it appears in the theatrical release, King tells his audience: "Hi, this is Larry King. The phone-in topic today: ghosts and ghostbusting," and goes on to note that controversy is building, sightings are increasing, and some callers maintain the Ghostbusters themselves may be causing the disturbances.2
King's scripted role in earlier drafts was considerably larger. In the August 5, September 30, and October 7, 1983 script drafts, a female caller is heard discussing Egon Spengler and a prediction of a "psychic shock" that her aunt made by reading coffee grounds.345 In the September 30 draft, Dana Barrett is listening to Larry King on the radio when she receives a phone call from Peter Venkman.4 The dialogue was recorded but not used in the theatrical cut; what remained was pared to the bone in editing.
A longer version of the Larry King scene was preserved in the Preview Cut of the film. At approximately the 47:04 mark of the Preview Cut, first made widely available on the 2022 Ghostbusters: Ultimate Edition, King is heard questioning whether the Ghostbusters should be permitted to carry unlicensed proton mass drivers, followed by a female caller asserting that Egon was right about the world being in for a "psychic shock."6 This material corresponds to dialogue from the August 1983 draft.3
Producer Joe Medjuck later recalled that the cameo registered very differently across the country: audiences on the East Coast were impressed that Larry King appeared in the film, while audiences on the West Coast often had no idea who he was.7
Personal life
King was married eight times to seven women. His marriages were to Freda Miller (1952, annulled 1953), Annette Kaye (1961, divorced the same year), Alene Akins (1961 to 1963, and again 1969 to 1972), Mickey Sutphin (1963 to 1967), Sharon Lepore (1976 to 1983), Julie Alexander (1989 to 1992), and Shawn Southwick (1997 to 2019). He had five children and nine grandchildren.1
Death
King experienced significant health challenges in his final decade. In February 1987 he underwent quintuple-bypass heart surgery following a severe heart attack.1 In 2017 he was treated for lung cancer; surgeons removed a cancerous lobe successfully.1 In March 2019 he suffered a stroke and spent weeks in a coma.1
On January 2, 2021, King was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after testing positive for COVID-19. He died there on January 23, 2021, at the age of 87. His official cause of death was sepsis as a complication of the COVID-19 infection.1
References
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
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"Larry King," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_King.
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Ghostbusters (1984), Ivan Reitman, director. Columbia Pictures. Chapter 14: "Welcome Aboard."
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Spook Central, "Ghostbusters Movie Script August 5, 1983 Excerpts," https://www.spookcentral.tk/sclib/ghostbusters-script-august-5-1983-excerpts. Excerpts derived from Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA. ISBN 0918432685.
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Spook Central, Ghostbusters script draft (September 30, 1983). Larry King radio studio scenes and Dana Barrett kitchen sequence.
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Spook Central, "Ghostbusters Script (October 7, 1983)," https://www.spookcentral.tk/sclib/ghostbusters-script-october-7-1983. Larry King radio studio and Lincoln Center voice-over scenes.
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Ghostbusters: Ultimate Edition 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray (Sony Pictures, 2022). First home-video release of the Preview Cut.
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Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 96. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA. ISBN 0918432685. Joe Medjuck: "It was interesting. On the East Coast, everyone kept saying: 'Wow! You're using the real Larry King?' And on the West Coast, everyone said, 'Who's Larry King?'"
