Roger Ebert Biography Quotes 34 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Roger Joseph Ebert was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Illinois, and grew up in nearby Champaign in the flat, pragmatic middle of America that would always anchor his tastes. His father, Walter, was an electrician; his mother, Annabel, a bookkeeper. The household was Catholic, small-town, and disciplined, and Ebert carried from it both a moral vocabulary and a lifelong reflex to test inherited certainties against lived experience.

As a boy he was drawn to words, movies, and the public square at once - the twin temples of his youth were the newspaper office and the theater marquee. He wrote early, edited his high school paper, and learned how quickly a sentence could take control of a room. In the postwar decades when television was remaking entertainment and suburbs were remaking identity, he became the kind of Midwestern observer who noticed not only what people watched, but what watching did to them.

Education and Formative Influences

Ebert attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he edited The Daily Illini and began publishing criticism with a confidence that startled older journalists; he also studied at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, absorbing the citys argumentative culture and its tradition of serious arts journalism. Chicago in the 1960s offered him both a professional ladder and a philosophical provocation: the arts were not decoration but evidence about how people live, desire, fear, and justify themselves.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

After freelancing and reporting, Ebert joined the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967 and quickly became its principal film critic, writing in an accessible, conversational voice that never hid his education but refused to perform it. In 1975 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the first film critic to receive it, and soon became a national figure through television - first on Sneak Previews with Gene Siskel, then in various incarnations of their combative partnership, which turned criticism into a spectator sport without surrendering standards. His books and projects ranged from collections of reviews to The Great Movies essays and the festival circuit (he championed smaller films and served as a visible presence at Cannes and beyond). A profound late-life turning point arrived with thyroid cancer and subsequent surgeries that cost him his jaw and his speaking voice; rather than retreat, he expanded his written work, moved aggressively into online publishing, and turned his own body into a test case for how criticism could outlive the critic.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Eberts criticism began with a simple wager: a review should help ordinary people think clearly about their own reactions without shaming them for having them. His famous practicality - pacing matters, boredom is real, craft counts - was inseparable from his insistence that movies are moral machines, training empathy or constricting it. He could be impatient with laziness and cruelty, but he was rarely a snob; he evaluated a slasher, a documentary, or an art-house drama by whether it fulfilled its own promise and whether it enlarged the viewer.

Beneath the brisk consumer guidance was a psychology built on emotional honesty and repeatable wonder. "Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you". That line explains his method: he trusted feeling as data, then used prose to interrogate it, separating sentimentality from earned emotion. His aphorism "No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough". was not a quip about runtime so much as a credo about attention - art earns time, and fraud squanders it. And his ideal of durability, "Every great film should seem new every time you see it". , reveals the romantic center he sometimes hid behind jokes: he believed cinema could renew perception, making the familiar strange and the strange intimate, again and again.

Legacy and Influence

Ebert died on April 4, 2013, in Chicago, but his influence only widened: he helped legitimize film criticism as a civic art, modeled a style that mixed clarity with conscience, and made the critic a companion rather than a gatekeeper. Through thousands of reviews, televised arguments, the four-star system, and late essays written in near-total physical silence, he demonstrated that taste can be educated without being elitist and that enthusiasm can coexist with rigor. In an era when criticism migrated from print to the web, his work remains a bridge - between popular and serious cinema, between private emotion and public language, and between the transient experience of a night at the movies and the enduring task of thinking about what we love.