Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert, possibly the United States' most recognized movie reviewer, didn't let the prospect of radiation treatment for oral cancer in 2003 daunt him. "I will … continue to see movies, write reviews and do the 'Ebert & Roeper' television show," he e-mailed his friends in a message subsequently published by the Associated Press. "The treatments are a follow-up to earlier surgery, and I look forward to a complete recovery."
Ebert, now 62 and living with his wife, attorney Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, in Chicago, had earlier conquered thyroid cancer, and when a salivary gland tumor he had been dealing with for years was found to be cancerous, he faced the future head on.
"This is not considered to be a life-threatening form of cancer," he reassured his friends in the same email message. His treatment lasted eight weeks, and his optimism seems to have been well-placed. The radiation appears to have pushed the cancer into remission and the critic continues to extol or lambaste the latest film releases in his columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, as he has since 1966.
Ebert grew up in Urbana, Illinois, where he began his journalism career in a way that today seems the stuff of movies: he started at 15 as a sports writer for his hometown newspaper, The News-Gazette, then worked his way up as an apprentice on the city desk. It was only natural that Ebert would lead his college newspaper, The Daily Illini, while he studied at the University of Illinois. Before he graduated, in 1964 with a bachelor's in journalism, he started getting bylines in the Chicago Sun-Times.
After he left UI, Ebert spent a year on a Rotary fellowship at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, then began his doctorate at the University of Chicago. But when the Sun-Times offered him a features writer position a year later, Ebert jumped at it. He wrote his first review for the Sun-Times six months after he was hired there, and in 1975 his no-punches-pulled, journalistic approach to movie reviewing earned Ebert the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a film critic.
The next year, Chicago's public television station asked Ebert to team with his arch-rival, Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel, to produce a movie-review show. Both men viewed the proposal with furrowed brows and crossed arms. Eventually, however, they agreed, and "Opening Soon at a Theater Near You" began airing in Chicago. Local viewers liked the unscripted approach, sharp-tongued banter and occasional heated arguments the two got themselves into. The series gained momentum and in 1978 PBS picked it up for national broadcast. Soon the entire nation looked to Sneak Previews to see which way Ebert's and Siskel's thumbs would point whenever new movies were screened.
Eventually the show went into syndication and the title changed to "Siskel and Ebert at the Movies," which was further pared down to "Siskel and Ebert." But in 1999, Ebert found himself without his friend and colleague when Siskel died suddenly at 53 of complications from brain surgery. To cope, Ebert leaned into his work. "Siskel and Ebert" became "Roger Ebert and The Movies," with a variety of critics sitting in Siskel's spot. None of them filled it adequately until columnist Richard Roeper gave it a whirl in 2000. The pairing was a fit, and the program continues in national syndication as "Ebert & Roeper."
Ebert's reviews and feature articles continue to be distributed through Universal Press Syndicate to more than 200 newspapers in the United States, Canada, England, Japan and Greece. He has shared his film expertise by teaching courses in Chicago colleges since the 1960s. He remains on the faculty at the University of Chicago as a film lecturer.
Ebert has also been a prolific author, penning at least 15 books, including annual editions of the popular Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook, Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary, Questions for the Movie Answer Man, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, The Norton anthology Roger Ebert's Book of Film, and Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, a book about his 25 years' experience at the Cannes Film Festival. But he hasn't limited himself to nonfiction: Ebert also wrote Behind the Phantom's Mask, and has tried his hand at screenwriting as well.
In addition to his Cannes festival work, Ebert has served on juries at the Sundance, Montreal, Chicago, Hawaii and Venice film festivals. In April 1999, he inaugurated his own annual film festival, which Chaz helps organize: "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival," located in Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
Ebert's personal life is, of course, also rich—thanks in part to early detection and treatment of oral cancer. According to Universal Press Syndicate, when Ebert is not reviewing films and spending time with Chaz and their family, his hobbies include "reading, cyberspace, walking, travel, sketching, cosmology, Darwinism and using the Japanese rice cooker to cook almost anything."