Longtime Price Is Right game show host Bob Barker dies at 99

Bob Barker, the longtime host of The Price is Right gameshow and a vocal animal rights activist, has died at the age of 99.

Barker died of natural causes at his home in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles on Saturday morning, his publicist Roger Neal announced.

“It is with profound sadness that we announce that the World’s Greatest MC who ever lived, Bob Barker has left us,” Mr Neal said in a statement.

Barker retired in 2007 after hosting the hit CBS game show since 1972.

During his career, Barker won 19 Daytime Emmy Awards., received an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999 and was inducted into the Television Academy’s Hall of Fame in 2004.

He also donated $5m to the anti-whaling Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which named one of their ships after him.

In 2013, Barker donated $1 million to move three captive elephants from the Toronto Zoo to a sanctuary in California.

Barker’s longtime friend, Nancy Burnet, who is also the co-executor of his estate released a statement on his death.

“I am so proud of the trailblazing work Barker and I did together to expose the cruelty to animals in the entertainment industry and including working to improve the plight of abused and exploited animals in the United States and internationally. We were great friends over these 40 years, and he will be missed,” she said.

Barker was born in Darrington, Washington, on 12 December 1923, and at the age of 6 moved to a Sioux Indian reservation in Mission, South Dakota, with his mother, Matilda, after his father died.

When his schoolteacher mother remarried the family moved to Missouri. Barker served for two years in the Navy towards the end of World War II and then attended Drury University where he graduated with an economics degree.