Gene Shalit, the longtime film critic for NBC’s TODAY show, died Friday at 100, his family said. The critic with the walrus mustache, colorful bowties and a taste for punchy wordplay spent four decades as one of television’s most familiar movie voices.
For viewers who searched his name on Friday, the reason was clear: a family announcement closed the book on a broadcaster who had become part of the morning routine. Meredith Vieira captured that place in the show’s history with a tribute, saying, “It’s hard to imagine not having him here. He is the ‘TODAY’ show.”
Shalit began at TODAY in 1970 as a part-time contributor and moved into a full-time role three years later. He retired in 2010 after a run that made him one of the program’s most recognizable figures, thanks to exuberant reviews, punning one-liners and the kind of comic timing that made Critics Corner its own small event.
He could be playful to a fault. On The Silence of the Lambs, he wrote that it “may be all wool and a yard wide, but it makes a terrific yarn,” while X-Men “should not be taken seriously. In fact, it should be taken with two aspirin.” He later called Funny People “passable,” adding “speaking colonically.” Those lines helped build the image of a critic who delighted in the joke as much as the verdict.
But the bright tone was never the whole story. Shalit was also capable of blunt pans, and that mix of whimsy and bite is part of why he stood out from the broadcast pack. He interviewed Oprah Winfrey and Harrison Ford, asked Kermit the Frog whether he planned to marry Miss Piggy, and carried a voice that could move from featherlight pun to hard-cut dismissal in a sentence.
Before television made him a fixture, Shalit worked as the senior film critic for Look Magazine, wrote the What’s Happening? page for Ladies Home Journal for a dozen years and published in, Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, Seventeen, Glamour and McCall’s. He also broadcast a daily Man About Anything essay on NBC’s coast-to-coast radio network from 1969 to 1982 and appeared as a regular panelist on What’s My Line? and To Tell The Truth.
Born Eugene Shalit on March 25, 1926, in New York and raised in New Jersey, he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949 after working as a sports editor, columnist and humor writer for The Daily Illini. He later became a reporter and writer for a Twin Cities daily newspaper and filed Big Ten sports dispatches as a freelancer for The in Chicago. His family said he “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life,” but did not release a cause of death or other public arrangements.
