Roger Joseph Ebert ( EE-bərt; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, essayist, screenwriter, journalist, and author. He wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Ebert was known for his intimate writing style and critical views informed by values of populism and humanism. Writing in a prose style intended to be entertaining and direct, he made sophisticated cinematic and analytical ideas more accessible to non-specialist audiences. Ebert endorsed foreign and independent films he believed would be appreciated by mainstream viewers, championing filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Errol Morris and Spike Lee, as well as Martin Scorsese, whose first published review he wrote. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic", and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America".
Early in his career, Ebert co-wrote Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Starting in 1975, Ebert and Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel helped popularize nationally televised film reviewing when they co-hosted the PBS show Sneak Previews, followed by several variously named At the Movies programs on commercial TV. The two verbally sparred and traded humorous barbs while discussing films. They created and trademarked the phrase "Two Thumbs Up". After Siskel died from a brain tumor in 1999, Ebert continued hosting the show with various co-hosts and, starting in 2000, with Richard Roeper. In 1996, Ebert began publishing essays on great films of the past; the first hundred were published as The Great Movies. In 1999, he founded the Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois.
In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands. His treatment included removing a section of his lower jaw in 2006, leaving him severely disfigured and unable to speak or eat normally. However, his ability to write remained unimpaired and he continued to publish online and in print until his 2013 death. RogerEbert.com remains online as an archive of his published writings, and publishes new film reviews written by featured contributors. Richard Corliss wrote, "Roger leaves a legacy of indefatigable connoisseurship in movies, literature, politics and, to quote the title of his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself." Life Itself was adapted as a documentary, released in 2014 to positive reviews.
Roger Joseph Ebert was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Illinois, the only child of Walter H Ebert, an electrician, and Annabel (née Stumm), a bookkeeper. He was raised Catholic, attending St. Mary's elementary school and serving as an altar boy in Urbana.
His paternal grandparents were German immigrants and his maternal ancestry was Irish and Dutch. His first movie memory was of his parents taking him to see the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races (1937). Mark Twain was an early influence; he wrote that "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" "had a direct and obvious influence on many of my reviews. Whenever I start picking the logic of a plot to shreds, I am Mark Twain’s pupil." Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was "the first real book I ever read, and still the best". He wrote letters of comment to science-fiction fanzines and founded his own, Stymie. At age 15, he was a sportswriter for The News-Gazette covering Urbana High School sports. He attended Urbana High School, where in his senior year he was class president and co-editor of his high school newspaper, The Echo. In 1958, he won the Illinois High School Association state speech championship in "radio speaking," an event that simulates radio newscasts.
Ebert began taking classes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an early-entrance student, completing his high school courses while also taking his first university class. After graduating from Urbana High School in 1960, he attended the University of Illinois and received his undergraduate degree in journalism in 1964. While there, Ebert worked as a reporter for The Daily Illini and served as its editor during his senior year while continuing to work for the News-Gazette.
His college mentor Daniel Curley "introduced me to many of the cornerstones of my life's reading: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, Nostromo, The Professor's House, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury ... He approached these works with undisguised admiration. We discussed patterns of symbolism, felicities of language, motivation, revelation of character. This was appreciation, not the savagery of deconstruction, which approaches literature as pliers do a rose." One of his classmates was Larry Woiwode, who went on to be the Poet Laureate of North Dakota. At The Daily Illini Ebert befriended William Nack, who as a sportswriter would cover Secretariat. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and president of the United States Student Press Association. One of his first published reviews was of La Dolce Vita.
As a graduate student, he "had the good fortune to enroll in a class on Shakespeare's tragedies taught by G. Blakemore Evans ... It was then that Shakespeare took hold of me, and it became clear he was the nearest we have come to a voice for what it means to be human." Ebert spent a semester as a master's student in English before attending the University of Cape Town on a Rotary fellowship for a year.
He returned from Cape Town to his graduate studies at Illinois for two more semesters and then, after being accepted as a PhD student at the University of Chicago, he prepared to move. He needed a job to support himself while he worked on his doctorate, and applied to the Chicago Daily News, hoping that, as he had already sold them freelance pieces, including an article on the death of Brendan Behan, he would be hired by editor Herman Kogan. Kogan referred Ebert to Chicago Sun-Times editor, Jim Hoge, who hired him as a reporter and feature writer in 1966. He attended doctoral classes at the University of Chicago while working as a general reporter for a year. After film critic Eleanor Keane left the Sun-Times in April 1967, editor Robert Zonka gave the job to Ebert. The paper wanted a young critic to cover films by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut and New Hollywood movies like The Graduate.
Beginning in 1968, Ebert worked for the University of Chicago as an adjunct lecturer, teaching a night class on film at the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. The load of graduate school and being a film critic proved too much, so Ebert left the University of Chicago to focus his energies on film criticism.
Ebert's first review for the Chicago Sun-Times began: "Georges Lautner's Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." He recalls that "Within a day after Zonka gave me the job, I read The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow", from which he gleaned that "the critic has to set aside theory and ideology, theology and politics, and open himself to—well, the immediate experience." That same year, he met Pauline Kael for the first time at the New York Film Festival. After he sent her some of his columns, she told him they were "the best film criticism being done in American newspapers today". He recalls her telling him how she worked: "I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me." A formative experience was reviewing Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). He told his editor he wasn't sure how to review it when he couldn't explain it. His editor told him he didn't have to explain it, just describe it.
He championed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life". He concluded: "The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn't mean a thing. It had to be set some time. But it was made now and it's about us." Thirty-one years later, he wrote "When I saw it, I had been a film critic for less than six months, and it was the first masterpiece I had seen on the job. I felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned that they were possible."