Roger Ebert dies after long cancer battle

Renowned Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert died Thursday at age 70 after a long battle with cancer.

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.

"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."

Film critics are mourning Ebert's loss on Twitter, a medium Ebert avidly embraced. New York Times critic A. O. Scott wrote, "Ebert was singular. We are all in his shadow and his debt."

"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."

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."

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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