Ebert (Getty Images)
Renowned Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert died Thursday after a long battle with cancer. He was 70.
Ebert's struggle with thyroid cancer, chronicled in a 2010 cover story by Esquire, lost him part of his jaw and the ability to eat and speak. He communicated through a computer program, and reached his many fans through Twitter and his blog, gaining admiration for his relentlessly positive attitude about his disease.
Ebert's death comes two days after he announced a "leave of presence" due to his health.
"For a generation of Americans?and especially Chicagoans?Roger was the movies," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "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."
Film critics are mourning Ebert's loss on Twitter, a medium Ebert avidly embraced.
"Ebert was singular," New York Times critic A. O. Scott tweeted. "We are all in his shadow and his debt."
"Roger Ebert was my hero," Scott Jordan Harris, a blogger for London's Telegraph and Ebert's U.K. correspondent wrote on Twitter. "More recently he became my boss and my friend. I will be forever honoured. I loved him."
"Man, I feel so lucky and so sad at the same time," Chris Jones, who wrote the Esquire cover story, tweeted. "I'll miss you Roger, very much."
"One of my favorite quotes, by Henry James, is: 'Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind,'" Time Out New York film critic and New York Film Critics Circle Keith Uhlich wrote in an email to Yahoo News. "That was Roger Ebert, a man somehow able to treat even undignified subjects?be it a godawful movie or a life-threatening illness?with clear-eyed compassion."
For 24 years, Ebert collaborated with fellow Chicagoan film critic Gene Siskel, until his death in 1999. The two were opposites, who fought like cats and dogs, according to Ebert himself.
"They were like a couple of ... cartoon characters," a friend said of them in an oral history of their partnership. "If you drew them, you couldn?t quite do the real thing justice?especially in the early days with those 1970s clothes. They didn?t look alike, they didn?t sound alike, and they didn?t think alike. They both had a much different delivery?Roger more contemplative and Gene kind of pushy."
"I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state," Ebert wrote in 2011. "I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can?t say it wasn?t interesting."
"Thank you for going on this journey with me," Ebert wrote on Tuesday. "I'll see you at the movies."
Below, a clip of Ebert defending "Return of the Jedi" on "Nightline" in 1983:
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/beloved-film-critic-roger-ebert-dies-70-204629958.html
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