Gene Shalit, TODAY Show Film Critic, Dies Aged 100
Gene Shalit, the film critic whose walrus moustache, colourful bowties and love of wordplay made him a fixture of NBC’s TODAY show for four decades, has died at the age of 100, his family confirmed on Friday.
“He passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life,” his family said in a statement to NBC News, adding: “The TODAY show was an extraordinary era for him.”
Shalit joined TODAY as a part-time contributor in 1970 before moving into a full-time role three years later, going on to become the programme’s go-to movie reviewer for the next several decades. His reviews, delivered in the show’s “Critics Corner” segment, were instantly recognisable for their puns and cheeky turns of phrase. Reviewing The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 — the film that would go on to win Best Picture the following year — he quipped: “The Silence of the Lambs may be all wool and a yard wide, but it makes a terrific yarn.” He was equally unsparing when a film disappointed him, dismissing the first X-Men film by saying it “should not be taken seriously. In fact, it should be taken with two aspirin,” and describing Judd Apatow’s Funny People as “passable — speaking colonically.”
Beyond his reviews, Shalit interviewed many of the biggest names in entertainment, from Oprah Winfrey to Harrison Ford, with questions ranging from the probing to the playful — including once asking Kermit the Frog whether he intended to marry Miss Piggy. In a more reflective conversation with Meryl Streep, he asked her: “Is there one day you’d like to live over again?”
Before his television career, Shalit worked as a print journalist, serving as senior film critic for Look Magazine and writing the “What’s Happening?” page for Ladies Home Journal for twelve years. His writing also appeared in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, Seventeen, Glamour and McCall’s. From 1969 to 1982, he wrote and broadcast a daily “Man About Anything” essay on NBC’s national radio network, and was also a regular panellist on the game shows What’s My Line? and To Tell The Truth.
Eugene Shalit was born on 25 March 1926 in New York and raised in New Jersey, where his father ran a drug store. According to his TODAY show profile, he created his elementary school’s first newspaper, The Spotlight, and bought a fedora so he would look the part of a journalist. He went on to write his high school newspaper’s humour column before graduating from the University of Illinois in 1949, where he worked as sports editor, columnist and humour writer for The Daily Illini. He later worked as a reporter for a Twin Cities daily newspaper and filed freelance dispatches on Big Ten sporting events for The Associated Press in Chicago.
Shalit retired from TODAY in 2010. Paying tribute to him at the time, former co-host Meredith Vieira said: “It’s hard to imagine not having him here. He is the TODAY show.” In the years since, Shalit largely stepped back from public life.
He was married to Nancy Lewis for 28 years, from 1950 until her death in 1978.
