Image Courtesy: ChatGPT
Gene Shalit was an American journalist, TV personality, and well-loved film and book critic. He became a national figure as the longtime on-air critic for NBC’s Today show (1970–2010), where he reviewed hundreds of movies and books. Shalit was known for his flashy “absent-minded professor” look and bushy grey hair, big handlebar moustache and his colourful bow ties.Viewers came to know his “Critic’s Corner” segments for their quick humour and friendly style.
Early Life & Education
Eugene Shalit was born on March 25, 1926, in New York City, and grew up in Newark and Morristown, New Jersey. He was active in journalism from a young age. At Illinois he edited the Daily Illini (the campus newspaper) and the sports page, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Science and Letters in 1949. The University of Illinois later inducted Shalit into its journalism Hall of Fame in 2007. After college, he returned to New York and began a career in media, initially as a magazine writer and columnist.
Remarkable Professional Career
Shalit started his career in print journalism and publicity. In the late 1950s, he worked briefly as Dick Clark’s press agent but left in 1960 when Clark got involved in Congress’s payola investigations. He got his start in television in 1970 when NBC invited him to appear on The Today Show. For the next 37 years, Shalit regularly appeared on the morning show, reviewing movies, books, and plays. Day by Day Shalit became a celebrity and pop culture figure. He made brief appearances in a few films and on TV. Notably, he voiced “Gene Scallop,” a fish-food critic character based on himself, in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. Writers and performers like Eugene Levy and Horatio Sanz showed Shalit as a charmingly quirky critic, making his image well-known to the public.
Shalit finally announced his retirement from Today in 2010, at age 84. The Today show aired a special farewell, with executive producer Jim Bell saying Shalit’s 40-year run was “unprecedented” on network TV. After leaving daily TV, Shalit mostly stayed out of the public eye. He made only a few public appearances (like wishing colleague Willard Scott well in 2015) and spent his later years quietly in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.
Besides television, Shalit had a side career as a writer and humorist. In 1965, he wrote Somehow It Works, a political book about the 1964 Presidential election. He wrote Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman: Their Lives Together (and Apart) (1972), a celebrity biography. In 1987, he also released Great Hollywood Wit, a collection of film‐set jokes and quips. In 1990, he put together Keep in Touch: An Album of Tony King’s Postcards, a fun collection of old cartoon postcards. Late in life he returned to a childhood idea – he published Khrushchev’s Top Secret Coloring Book (1962), an adult humour parody, which was reissued in the 2010s.
For decades, Shalit also wrote newspaper and magazine columns and essays. During the 1970s, he regularly contributed to Ladies’ Home Journal (writing a humour page called “What’s Happening?” for 12 years) and kept publishing humour pieces in Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, and other magazines. He has won numerous awards through out his life.
Shalit married Nancy Lewis in 1950. They stayed together, and later she died of cancer in 1978. They had six children. Although TV viewers generally liked him, Shalit was sometimes criticised by other film critics. He purposely avoided negative reviews. Shalit also caused controversy; in 2006, he gave Brokeback Mountain a negative review, calling Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) a “sexual predator.” This led to quick criticism from GLAAD, which said Shalit’s words were “defamatory, ignorant and irresponsible.” Shalit apologised for how he wrote the review, and his son Peter publicly defended him.
He was one of the last full-time film critics working for a major TV network. Gene Shalit’s family did not share a specific medical cause of death. They only said he “passed away peacefully” at 100 after “an amazing life.”
