Undated: Veteran broadcaster Larry King has announced that he will be ending his famous show on CNN in the autumn.

Over 25 years of the show, King, famous for wearing braces, has conducted more than 40,000 interviews.

Larry King Live recently made it into in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running show with the same host in the same time slot.

The news comes at a time of falling ratings for the show. King, 76, said he would spend more time with his family.

He said he would "still be a part of the CNN family" and planned to host special programmes on major national and international events.

Over the course of his career, King has interviewed every US president since Gerald Ford. His most recent interviewees include Bill Gates and singer Lady Gaga.

The news of King`s decision to end his show comes only a week after New York Times media critic David Carr suggested CNN needed to find a worthy successor for him soon.

"As it is, Mr King has been left to dangle, battered by tabloid reports, sliding ratings and his own daily battle to anchor the show five days a week," he wrote.

"The more legendary the talent, the more delicate the endgame."

Controversial positions

On September 10, 1990, while on The Joan Rivers Show, Rivers asked King which contestant in the Miss America pageant was "the ugliest." King responded, "Miss Pennsylvania. She was one of the 10 finalists and she did a great ventriloquist bit. The dummy was prettier."

King was a judge for the September 8, 1990 pageant. King later sent Miss Pennsylvania, Marla Wynne, a dozen long-stemmed roses and a telegram apologizing for saying she was the ugliest contestant in the pageant that year.

In 1997, King was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany, comparing it to the Nazis` oppression of Jews in the 1930s.Other signatories included Dustin Hoffman and Goldie Hawn.

On September 23, 2004, John Clark sued King and CNN after an interview with his ex-wife, Lynn Redgrave, aired. Clark argued that he was defamed by the banner statements scrolling at the bottom of the screen, and that the taped show did not allow him to appear to defend himself.

The court would not allow the suit to proceed, ruling that he was not defamed. Two years later, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, dismissed his appeal.

In July 2009, King appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O`Brien, where he told host O`Brien about his wishes to be cryogenically preserved upon death, as he had revealed in his book My Remarkable Journey.

Personal life

King has been married eight times, to seven women.He married high-school sweetheart Freda Miller in 1952 at age 19.The union ended the following year at the behest of their parents, who reportedly had the marriage annulled.

King was later briefly married to Annette Kayewho gave birth to his son, Larry Jr., in November 1961. King did not meet Larry Jr. until the son was in his thirties. Larry Jr. and his wife Shannon have three children.

In 1961, King married his third wife, Alene Akins, a Playboy bunny at one of the magazine`s titular nightclubs. The couple had son Andy in 1962, and divorced the following year. In 1963, King married his fourth wife, Mary Francis "Mickey" Sutphin, who divorced King. He remarried Akins, with whom he had a second child, Chaia, in 1969. The couple divorced a second time in 1972. In 1997, Dove Books published a book written by King and Chaia, Daddy Day, Daughter Day. Aimed at young children, it tells each of their accounts of his divorce from Akins.


BDST 1014 HRS. JUNE 30, 2010.