Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert (Urbana, Illinois, 1942 - Chicago, 2013) was an American film critic whose work in newspapers and television made him one of the most recognized reviewers of his time. He wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times for almost half a century, and in 1975 became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His writing helped bring serious film analysis to readers who had no specialist training.

The only child of an electrician and a bookkeeper, he grew up in Urbana in a Catholic household. While still young he wrote for local papers and for science-fiction fanzines. At the University of Illinois he studied journalism and edited the student paper, The Daily Illini. Mark Twain was an early influence on his sharp, plain way of judging a plot. He then spent a year at the University of Cape Town on a Rotary fellowship and was accepted into a doctoral program at the University of Chicago, though he eventually left it to devote himself to criticism. Early in his career he co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), a film he later joked about being responsible for.

In 1967 the Sun-Times gave him the job of film critic. He was expected to cover the French New Wave directors, such as Godard and Truffaut, along with the new Hollywood films. His style was direct and personal. He preferred to describe what a film did to a viewer rather than apply theory. He championed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and supported foreign and independent filmmakers, including Werner Herzog, Errol Morris and Spike Lee. He also backed Martin Scorsese, whose first published review was written by Ebert.

His name is also tied to television. Starting in 1975 he co-hosted film-review programs with Gene Siskel, a critic for the Chicago Tribune. The shows began on PBS as Sneak Previews and later ran under various At the Movies titles. The two traded good-natured jabs as they discussed films, and their thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture gave rise to the phrase "Two Thumbs Up," which they trademarked. After Siskel died in 1999, Ebert kept hosting with a series of co-hosts and, from 2000, with Richard Roeper.

He wrote many books about film. In 1996 he began publishing essays on great films of the past, the first hundred of which appeared as The Great Movies. In 1999 he founded the Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois. In 2002 he was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands. Treatment left him unable to speak or eat normally, but he kept writing until his death in 2013, at the age of 70. His 2011 autobiography, Life Itself, was adapted into a documentary released in 2014.

His legacy rests largely on his ability to make film analysis accessible to readers without specialist training, in a conversational voice free of pretension. His archive of reviews remains online, and RogerEbert.com still publishes new reviews by featured contributors.