Roger Ebert, 1942–2013
The critic who gave cinema a big thumbs-up
Roger Ebert could determine a movie’s fortunes with a thumbs-up or -down, but he liked to expand on his judgments with mordant wit. “No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out,” he wrote of Armageddon, for instance. Ebert never lost his love for cinema in 46 years of reviewing, and once said he imagined an afterlife featuring “Citizen Kane and vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream.”
Ebert embraced journalism in childhood, said the Chicago Sun-Times, publishing a neighborhood newspaper from his parents’ basement. He edited newspapers in high school and at the University of Illinois before being offered a part-time job in 1966 at the Sun-Times; a year later he was named the newspaper’s film critic. Movie criticism had, until then, been a “backwater of journalism,” but Ebert’s appointment coincided with a “period of unprecedented creativity” in American cinema.
Despite a brief hiatus in 1970 to write the screenplay for notoriously breast-obsessed director Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Ebert secured a reputation as a serious critic, said the Los Angeles Times. In 1975, he became the first movie reviewer to win a Pulitzer Prize; the same year, Chicago TV executives had the idea to put him and his “fierce archrival” Gene Siskel together on public TV. By 1978, the bickering duo’s show was the highest-rated in the history of public broadcasting. Even after Disney bought it in 1986, said The New York Times, the show’s format never changed: five films, each introduced with a clip, reviewed in a flurry of “knitted brows, are-you-serious head-shaking, and gentle (or not) barbs.” Then, the conclusion, “harking back to the Roman Colosseum”: thumbs-up or -down. The show continued until 1999, when Siskel died of a brain tumor. In 2006, Ebert left the air after he got cancer, too.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Cancer cost Ebert his lower jaw and his ability to speak, said Slate.com, but never silenced him. He became a “prolific blogger, tireless tweeter, and link-finder extraordinaire,” building a whole new audience of online fans. Until the end, he reviewed movies—306 in the last year—while writing about art, love, friendship, and, above all, life. “We are put on this planet only once,” he wrote, “and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.”
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Cicada-geddon: the fungus that controls insects like 'zombies'
Under The Radar Expert says bugs will develop 'hypersexualisation' despite their genitals falling off
By Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK Published
-
'Voters know Biden and Trump all too well'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Harold Maass, The Week US Published
-
Is the Gaza war tearing US university campuses apart?
Today's Big Question Protests at Columbia University, other institutions, pit free speech against student safety
By Joel Mathis, The Week US Published
-
Benjamin Zephaniah: trailblazing writer who 'took poetry everywhere'
Why Everyone's Talking About Remembering the 'radical' wordsmith's 'wit and sense of mischief'
By The Week UK Published
-
Shane MacGowan: the unruly former punk with a literary soul
Why Everyone's Talking About The Pogues frontman died aged 65
By The Week UK Published
-
'Euphoria' star Angus Cloud dies at 25
Speed Read
By Catherine Garcia Published
-
Legendary jazz and pop singer Tony Bennett dies at 96
Speed Read
By Devika Rao Published
-
Martin Amis: literary wunderkind who ‘blazed like a rocket’
feature Famed author, essayist and screenwriter died this week aged 73
By The Week Staff Published
-
Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian folk legend, is dead at 84
Speed Read
By Peter Weber Published
-
Barry Humphries obituary: cerebral satirist who created Dame Edna Everage
feature Actor and comedian was best known as the monstrous Melbourne housewife and Sir Les Patterson
By The Week Staff Published
-
Mary Quant obituary: pioneering designer who created the 1960s look
feature One of the most influential fashion designers of the 20th century remembered as the mother of the miniskirt
By The Week Staff Published