New York Times News Service via Peninsula Daily News staff
ROGER EBERT, THE popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, has died.
His death was reported by The Chicago Sun-Times.
Ebert’s struggle with cancer, starting in 2002, gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness.
Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (he was fed through a tube and a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his chin) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook he had started, on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.
READ MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/movies/roger-ebert-film-critic-dies.html?emc=na
