Roger Ebert, critic with the golden thumb, dies at 70

Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.

His death was announced by the Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002.

It would not be a stretch to say that Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of US culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see but also how to think about what they saw.

Reacting to Ebert’s death President Barack Obama said: “For a generation of Americans - especially Chicagoans - Roger was the movies. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive - capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical.”

Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image - as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Although he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.”

In recent years, Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well. He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. He commented on pro football, his captions for The New Yorker cartoon contest, an old pub he once frequented, James Joyce short stories and untold numbers of movies and television shows, to which he linked.

Ebert liked to say his approach - dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions - reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering.

His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialized film criticism. Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1991, Ebert agreed that his television program at the time was "not a high-level, in-depth film-criticism show." But he argued that it demonstrated to younger viewers that one can bring standards of judgment to movies, that "it's OK to have an opinion."

In 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his Sun-Times reviews. His columns were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad, and he wrote more than 15 books, many by skillfully recycling his columns.

In 2005 he became the first film critic to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. "In the century or so that there has been such a thing as film criticism, no other critic has ever occupied the space held by Roger Ebert," Mick LaSalle, movie critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 2010. "Others as influential as Ebert have not been as esteemed. Others as esteemed as Ebert have not had the same direct and widespread influence. And no one, but no one, has enjoyed the same fame."

New York Times service