Larry King, the celebrity interviewer: a movie life crossed by controversy, tragedies and divorces

01/23/2021 1:31 PM

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Updated 01/23/2021 1:40 PM

His shows were a classic on American television for decades.

Larry King, who just died at 87, a victim of covid, installed a style that became famous throughout the world.

Throughout his life he conducted more than 50,000 thousand interviews with personalities from all walks of life: from former President Barack Obama to Frank Sinatra, Sharon Stone and boxing champion Muhammed Ali.

Throughout 25 years, between 1985 and 2010,

thousands of guests

passed through his

Larry King Live program

on CNN: Hollywood figures, elite athletes, rock stars, politicians, and also some non-famous characters but with shocking stories.

Among the most memorable reports is the one that King did to Hugh Grant, in 1995, in full stardom and shortly after the scandal unleashed by the actor (for which he was arrested)

when he was found by the police with the prostitute Divine Brown

having sex in a car, in Los Angeles.

King also managed to interview Christopher Reeve, the protagonist of

Superman

,

when the actor was already paraplegic

after suffering a riding accident that changed his life forever.

Larry King.

In an interview with the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in 2007 (AFP Photo)

Usually, on King's program there were controversial figures such as the medium Rosemary Altea or the famous seer Sylvia Browne, with whom King spoke openly about subjects such as

death and paranormal phenomena

, something that the host was especially interested in.

Many times King received criticism about his interviews as being too light and claiming that he did not prepare enough to face the interviewees.

King did not shy away from the subject,

saying that he did not usually read too much

and did rely on intuition and improvisation to ask the questions.

"My secret lies in not having any planning. I do not enter the program saying today I will have this interviewee and tomorrow I will be in the newspaper.

I

enter

willing to entertain and learn.

I know how to measure my pace. I have been in this medium long enough to know when a program works well, "he explained.

Larry King.

Interview with boxer Mike Tyson, at his legendary show in 1995 (AP Photo)

On the other hand, he assured that the reports he liked the most were those in which he made the interviewee show his most sensitive side.

"The most frustrating people are those who cannot express themselves emotionally, since my job is to get them to do so," he admitted.

His personal life was intense: he

was married eight times, had seven children

 (three of whom were the children of his partners but he adopted as his own during their marriages), and

two of them died last year

, three weeks apart.

Those losses, added to the fact that they were unable to say goodbye to their children, due to the restrictions of the pandemic, led to a deterioration in their health, which had already suffered a stroke a few months before.

For decades,

King smoked three packs of cigarettes a day

.

Many times he did it during interviews and even left a lit cigarette on his desk to continue smoking while he did the reports.

In 1987, King suffered a heart attack and had to undergo surgery involving

a five-fold

bypass

.

After that, he became a fervent advocate of anti-smoking, wrote books and gave lectures to raise awareness of its risks.

Larry King in an interview with Donald Trump in 1999 (AP Photo)

In addition to his eight marriages,

King had romances with some actresses, including Angie Dickinson (

the remembered protagonist of the

Police Woman

series

), and participated in several films as an actor, playing supporting characters, making cameos or giving the voice as Dorris as in

Shrek 2

.

Frontal, more than once

starred in scandals for which he had to apologize later

.

One of the most popular was in 1990, during the

Joan Rivers

show

, in which contestants for Miss America appeared and King was part of the jury.

When asked by Rivers, King assured that the Pennsylvania contestant was the ugliest.

He immediately had to publicly apologize to her, to whom he sent a bouquet of roses along with the telegram, recanting his words.

More recently, in an interview with him in 2017, he was asked about former President Donald Trump and after criticizing him, he declared that his government seemed "ridiculous."

IS