Gene Shalit, the fast-talking funnyman who reviewed films, plays and books for NBC’s “Today” show has died. He was 100.
Shalit’s family confirmed the longtime critic’s death Friday, telling NBC that he “passed away peacefully after 100 years of an amazing life.”
According to a 2010 interview with Guy Ludwig, Shalit’s producer for more than 20 years, Shalit was hired as a contributor at “Today” in 1968. He reviewed books once a month or so, but audiences were so fascinated by his eccentric personality and equally unconventional looks that NBC ramped up the critic’s on-air appearances.
In January 1973, on the same day he was promoted to arts editor, Shalit debuted “Critic’s Corner,” the segment that would ultimately make him a household name. In 2010, Shalit retired as one of the last regular film critics on a major network.
Ludwig referred to Shalit as the “foxy grandpa” of the “Today” show.
Shalit cut his teeth in media as an entertainment columnist for McCall’s magazine, eventually landing the role of senior film critic for Look magazine in 1968 and writing a humor column for Ladies’ Home Journal. His quick wit, punchy puns and unique voice came through even on the page, and NBC took notice.
“No one at NBC had seen him. They’d only read his stuff. So he walked into this executive’s office and the executive took one look at him and said, ‘Mr. Shalit, have you ever thought of radio?’” Ludwig told “Today.”
“They didn’t know how the public would react to someone who looked so different from people who were typically on TV in 1967.”
On “Critics Corner,” Shalit favored humor over the highfalutin. He was an everyman’s critic. Of 1997’s action-thriller “Face/Off,” he said, “Now, ‘Face/Off’ is a literal title, because both of their faces are taken off. Then each face is put onto the other’s head. Even their voices are switched with microchip implants. In other words, this is an entirely reasonable, rational movie!”
“Many critics will give so much of the plot of a movie away that they destroy the movie for the viewer … I just don’t give away the story,” he told the Associated Press in 1993.
During his tenure, he was known to bust up his colleagues, and “Today” anchors ranging from Edwin Newman, Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley to Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Al Roker and Meredith Vieira.
But not everyone appreciated Shalit’s style. In 1989, a leaked in-house memo from “Today” show co-host Bryant Gumbel to Marty Ryan, the former executive producer of the NBC program, complained that Shalit’s film reviews “are often late and his interviews aren’t very good.”
Eugene Shalit was born March 25, 1926, in New York City and grew up in Morristown, N.J. He launched his elementary school’s first newspaper, “The Spotlight,” and purchased a fedora to seal his fate as a journalist. In Morristown High School he wrote the school newspaper’s humor column “The Broadcaster.” In 1949, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Shalit was married to Nancy Lewis for 28 years until her death in 1978 and never remarried. The couple had six children: Peter, Willa, Emily, Amanda, Nevin and Andrew. Emily died from ovarian cancer in 2012.