Roger Ebert Dies At 70

Famed film critic Roger Ebert died at the age of 70 today after a years-long battle with cancer.

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland. He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers.

Ebert was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Gene Siskel, Ebert's partner in the long-running Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, died in 1999.