Roger Ebert

Roger Joseph Ebert ( EE-bərt; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, essayist, screenwriter, journalist, and author. He wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Ebert was known for his intimate writing style and critical views informed by values of populism and humanism. Writing in a prose style intended to be entertaining and direct, he made sophisticated cinematic and analytical ideas more accessible to non-specialist audiences. Ebert endorsed foreign and independent films he believed would be appreciated by mainstream viewers, championing filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Errol Morris and Spike Lee, as well as Martin Scorsese, whose first published review he wrote. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic", and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America".

Early in his career, Ebert co-wrote Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Starting in 1975, Ebert and Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel helped popularize nationally televised film reviewing when they co-hosted the PBS show Sneak Previews, followed by several variously named At the Movies programs on commercial TV. The two verbally sparred and traded humorous barbs while discussing films. They created and trademarked the phrase "Two Thumbs Up". After Siskel died from a brain tumor in 1999, Ebert continued hosting the show with various co-hosts and, starting in 2000, with Richard Roeper. In 1996, Ebert began publishing essays on great films of the past; the first hundred were published as The Great Movies. In 1999, he founded the Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois.

In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands. His treatment included removing a section of his lower jaw in 2006, leaving him severely disfigured and unable to speak or eat normally. However, his ability to write remained unimpaired and he continued to publish online and in print until his 2013 death. RogerEbert.com remains online as an archive of his published writings, and publishes new film reviews written by featured contributors. Richard Corliss wrote, "Roger leaves a legacy of indefatigable connoisseurship in movies, literature, politics and, to quote the title of his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself." Life Itself was adapted as a documentary, released in 2014 to positive reviews.

Roger Joseph Ebert was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Illinois, the only child of Walter H Ebert, an electrician, and Annabel (née Stumm), a bookkeeper. He was raised Catholic, attending St. Mary's elementary school and serving as an altar boy in Urbana.

His paternal grandparents were German immigrants and his maternal ancestry was Irish and Dutch. His first movie memory was of his parents taking him to see the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races (1937). Mark Twain was an early influence; he wrote that "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" "had a direct and obvious influence on many of my reviews. Whenever I start picking the logic of a plot to shreds, I am Mark Twain’s pupil." Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was "the first real book I ever read, and still the best". He wrote letters of comment to science-fiction fanzines and founded his own, Stymie. At age 15, he was a sportswriter for The News-Gazette covering Urbana High School sports. He attended Urbana High School, where in his senior year he was class president and co-editor of his high school newspaper, The Echo. In 1958, he won the Illinois High School Association state speech championship in "radio speaking," an event that simulates radio newscasts.

Ebert began taking classes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an early-entrance student, completing his high school courses while also taking his first university class. After graduating from Urbana High School in 1960, he attended the University of Illinois and received his undergraduate degree in journalism in 1964. While there, Ebert worked as a reporter for The Daily Illini and served as its editor during his senior year while continuing to work for the News-Gazette.

His college mentor Daniel Curley "introduced me to many of the cornerstones of my life's reading: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, Nostromo, The Professor's House, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury ... He approached these works with undisguised admiration. We discussed patterns of symbolism, felicities of language, motivation, revelation of character. This was appreciation, not the savagery of deconstruction, which approaches literature as pliers do a rose." One of his classmates was Larry Woiwode, who went on to be the Poet Laureate of North Dakota. At The Daily Illini Ebert befriended William Nack, who as a sportswriter would cover Secretariat. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and president of the United States Student Press Association. One of his first published reviews was of La Dolce Vita.

As a graduate student, he "had the good fortune to enroll in a class on Shakespeare's tragedies taught by G. Blakemore Evans ... It was then that Shakespeare took hold of me, and it became clear he was the nearest we have come to a voice for what it means to be human." Ebert spent a semester as a master's student in English before attending the University of Cape Town on a Rotary fellowship for a year.

Ebert's first review for the Chicago Sun-Times began: "Georges Lautner's Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." He recalls that "Within a day after Zonka gave me the job, I read The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow", from which he gleaned that "the critic has to set aside theory and ideology, theology and politics, and open himself to—well, the immediate experience." That same year, he met Pauline Kael for the first time at the New York Film Festival. After he sent her some of his columns, she told him they were "the best film criticism being done in American newspapers today". He recalls her telling him how she worked: "I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me." A formative experience was reviewing Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). He told his editor he wasn't sure how to review it when he couldn't explain it. His editor told him he didn't have to explain it, just describe it.

He championed Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life". He concluded: "The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn't mean a thing. It had to be set some time. But it was made now and it's about us." Thirty-one years later, he wrote "When I saw it, I had been a film critic for less than six months, and it was the first masterpiece I had seen on the job. I felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned that they were possible."

Ebert co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and sometimes joked about being responsible for it. It was poorly received on its release yet has become a cult film. Ebert and Meyer also made Up! (1976), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) and other films, and were involved in the ill-starred Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi?, also known as Anarchy in the UK. In April 2010, Ebert posted his screenplay of Who Killed Bambi?, on his blog.

Ebert served on the jury at the 33rd Venice International Film Festival in 1972.

In 1975, Ebert received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism "For his film criticism during 1974." In the aftermath of his win, he was offered jobs at The New York Times and The Washington Post, but he declined them both, as he did not wish to leave Chicago. That same year, he and Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune began co-hosting a weekly television show, Opening Soon at a Theater Near You, later Sneak Previews, which was locally produced by the Chicago public broadcasting station WTTW. The duo became famous for their "thumbs up/thumbs down" reviews. They trademarked the phrase "Two Thumbs Up".

In 1982, they moved from PBS to launch a similar syndicated commercial television show, At the Movies with Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert. In 1986, they again moved the show to new ownership, creating Siskel & Ebert & the Movies through Buena Vista Television, part of the Walt Disney Company. Ebert and Siskel made many appearances on late night talk shows, appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman sixteen times and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson fifteen times. They also appeared together on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Arsenio Hall Show, The Howard Stern Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Siskel and Ebert were sometimes accused of trivializing film criticism. Richard Corliss called the show "a sitcom (with its own noodling, toodling theme song) starring two guys who live in a movie theater and argue all the time". Ebert responded that "I am the first to agree with Corliss that the Siskel and Ebert program is not in-depth film criticism" but that "When we have an opinion about a movie, that opinion may light a bulb above the head of an ambitious youth who then understands that people can make up their own minds about movies." He also noted that they did "theme shows" condemning colorization and showing the virtues of letterboxing. He argued that "good criticism is commonplace these days. Film Comment itself is healthier and more widely distributed than ever before. Film Quarterly is, too; it even abandoned eons of tradition to increase its page size. And then look at Cinéaste and American Film and the specialist film magazines (you may not read Fangoria, but if you did, you would be amazed at the erudition its writers bring to the horror and special effects genres.)" Corliss wrote that "I do think the program has other merits, and said so in a sentence of my original article that didn't make it into type: 'Sometimes the show does good: in spotlighting foreign and independent films, and in raising issues like censorship and colorization.' The stars' recent excoriation of the MPAA's X rating was salutary to the max." Andrew Sarris intervened: "I would caution Corliss against the sin of despair. And I would advise Ebert that what is at risk in his very accomplished Laurel-and-Hardy routines with Gene Siskel is neither his aesthetic integrity nor his emotional sincerity, but, rather, what I have perceived in private conversations as an irreverent wit being steadily eroded by too calculating a deference to the banalities of a mass audience."

In 1996, W. W. Norton & Company asked Ebert to edit an anthology of film writing. This resulted in Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing From a Century of Film. The selections are eclectic, ranging from Louise Brooks's autobiography to David Thomson's novel Suspects. In 1996, Ebert "wrote to Nigel Wade, then the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, and proposed a biweekly series of longer articles great movies of the past. He gave his blessing ... Every other week I have revisited a great movie, and the response has been encouraging." A hundred of these essays were published as The Great Movies (2002); he released two more volumes, and a fourth was published posthumously. In 1999, Ebert founded The Overlooked Film Festival (later Ebertfest), in his hometown, Champaign, Illinois.

In May 1998, Siskel took a leave of absence from the show to undergo brain surgery. He returned to the show, although viewers noticed a change in his physical appearance. Despite appearing sluggish and tired, Siskel continued reviewing films with Ebert and would appear on Late Show with David Letterman. In February 1999, Siskel died of a brain tumor.

In September 2000, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper became the permanent co-host of the show renamed At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper and later Ebert & Roeper. In 2000, Ebert interviewed President Bill Clinton about movies at The White House.

In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary glands. In 2006, cancer surgery resulted in his losing his ability to eat and speak. In 2007, prior to his Overlooked Film Festival, he posted a picture of his new condition. Paraphrasing Raging Bull (1980), he wrote, "I ain't a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of Siskel & Ebert was that we didn't look like we belonged on TV.)" He added that he would not miss the festival: "At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is 'overlooked', or why I wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls."

Ebert ended his association with At the Movies in July 2008, after Disney indicated it wished to take the program in a new direction. As of 2007, his reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. His "RogerEbert.com" website, launched in 2002 and originally underwritten by the Chicago Sun-Times, remains online as an archive of his published writings and reviews while also hosting new material written by a group of critics who were selected by Ebert before his death. Ebert continued to write for the Chicago Sun-Times until he died. On February 18, 2009, Ebert reported that he and Roeper would soon announce a new movie-review program and reiterated this plan after Disney announced that the program's last episode would air in August 2010. In 2008, having lost his voice, he turned to blogging to express himself. Peter Debruge writes that "Ebert was one of the first writers to recognize the potential of discussing film online."

His final television series, Ebert Presents: At the Movies, premiered on January 21, 2011, with Ebert contributing a review voiced by Bill Kurtis in a brief segment called "Roger's Office," as well as traditional reviews in the At the Movies format by Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. The program lasted one season, before being cancelled due to funding constraints.

In 2011, he published his memoir, Life Itself, in which he describes his childhood, his career, his struggles with alcoholism and cancer, his loves and friendships. On March 7, 2013, Ebert published his last Great Movies essay, for The Ballad of Narayama (1958). The last review Ebert published during his lifetime was for The Host, on March 27, 2013. The last review Ebert filed, published posthumously on April 6, 2013, was for To the Wonder. In July 2013, a previously unpublished review of Computer Chess appeared on RogerEbert.com. The review had been written in March but had remained unpublished until the film's wide-release date. RogerEbert.com editor Matt Zoller Seitz confirmed that there were other unpublished reviews that would eventually be posted. A second review, for The Spectacular Now, was published in August 2013.

In his last blog entry, posted two days before his death, Ebert wrote that his cancer had returned and he was taking "a leave of presence." "What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review." He signed off, "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies."

At age 50, Ebert married trial attorney Charlie "Chaz" Hammel-Smith in 1992. Chaz became vice president of the Ebert Company and has emceed Ebertfest. He explained in Life Itself that he did not want to marry before his mother died, as he was afraid of displeasing her. In a July 2012 blog entry, Ebert wrote about Chaz, "She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading... She has been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That's what a marriage is for. Now I know."

Ebert was a recovering alcoholic, having quit drinking in 1979. He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and had written some blog entries on the subject.

In February 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer which was successfully removed. In 2003, he underwent surgery for salivary gland cancer, which was followed up by radiation therapy. He was again diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In June of that year, he had a mandibulectomy to remove cancerous tissue in the right side of his jaw. A week later he had a life-threatening complication when his carotid artery burst near the surgery site. He was confined to bed rest and was unable to speak, eat, or drink, necessitating the use of a feeding tube.

The complications kept Ebert off the air for an extended period. Ebert made his first public appearance since mid-2006 at Ebertfest on April 25, 2007. Unable to speak, he communicated through his wife. He returned to reviewing on May 18, 2007, when three of his reviews were published in print. In July 2007, he revealed that he was still unable to speak. Ebert adopted a computerized voice system to communicate, eventually using a copy of his own voice created from his recordings by CereProc.

In March 2010, his health trials and new computerized voice were featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2011, Ebert gave a TED talk assisted by his wife, Chaz, and friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, "Remaking my voice" in which, he proposed a test to determine the verisimilitude of a synthesized voice.

Ebert underwent further surgery in January 2008 to try to restore his voice and address the complications from his previous surgeries. On April 1, Ebert announced his speech had not been restored. Ebert underwent further surgery in April 2008 after fracturing his hip in a fall. By 2011, Ebert had a prosthetic chin made to hide some of the damage done by his many surgeries.

In December 2012, Ebert was hospitalized due to the fractured hip, which was subsequently determined to be the result of cancer.

A lifelong member of the Democratic Party, Ebert wrote of how his Catholic schooling led him to his politics: "Through a mental process that has by now become almost instinctive, those nuns guided me into supporting universal health care, the rightness of labor unions, fair taxation, prudence in warfare, kindness in peacetime, help for the hungry and homeless, and equal opportunity for the races and genders. It continues to surprise me that many who consider themselves religious seem to tilt away from me."

Ebert was a critic of political correctness, "a rigid feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your ways of looking at things within very narrow boundaries, or you'll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge that kind of thinking. And certainly one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries. It's also one of the purposes of art." He lamented that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has "been under fire in recent years from myopic advocates of Political Correctness, who do not have a bone of irony (or humor) in their bodies, and cannot tell the difference between what is said or done in the novel, and what Twain means by it." Ebert defended the cast and crew of Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) during a Sundance Film Festival screening when a white audience member asked "Why, with the talent up there and yourself, make a film so empty and amoral for Asian Americans and for Americans?" Ebert responded that "What I find very offensive and condescending about your statement is nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, 'How could you do this to 'your people'?...Asian-American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be. They do not have to represent 'their people'!"

Ebert opposed the Iraq War, writing: "Am I against the war? Of course. Do I support our troops? Of course. They were sent to endanger their lives by zealots with occult objectives." He was concerned about income inequality, writing: "I have no objection to financial success. I've had a lot of it myself. All of my income came from paychecks from jobs I held and books I published. I have the quaint idea that wealth should be obtained by legal and conventional means–by working, in other words–and not through the manipulation of financial scams. You're familiar with the ways bad mortgages were urged upon people who couldn't afford them, by banks who didn't care that the loans were bad. The banks made the loans and turned a profit by selling them to investors while at the same time betting against them on their own account. While Wall Street was knowingly trading the worthless paper that led to the financial collapse of 2008, executives were being paid huge bonuses." He voiced tentative support for the Occupy Wall Street movement: "I believe the Occupiers are opposed to the lawless and destructive greed in the financial industry, and the unhealthy spread in this country between the rich and the rest." Referring to the subprime mortgage crisis, he wrote: "I have also felt despair at the way financial instruments were created and manipulated to deliberately defraud the ordinary people in this country. At how home buyers were peddled mortgages they couldn't afford, and civilian investors were sold worthless 'securities' based on those bad mortgages. Wall Street felt no shame in backing paper that was intended to fail, and selling it to customers who trusted them. This is clear and documented. It is theft and fraud on a staggering scale." Reviewing Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010), he wrote, "There is no moral justification for how Wall Street functions today."

He was concerned about the national debt of the United States. In a review of the documentary I.O.U.S.A. (2008), he wrote based on the film that the US government was "already broke". He opposed the war on drugs and capital punishment. He lamented declining educational standards in the United States, blaming both rightwing schoolboards and teachers' unions.

Laura Emerick, his Sun Times editor, recalled: "His union sympathies began at an early age. His father, Walter, worked as an electrician, and Roger remained a member of the Newspaper Guild throughout his career — though after he became an independent contractor, he probably could have opted out. He famously stood with the Guild in 2004, when he wrote to then publisher John Cruickshank that 'it would be with a heavy heart that I would go on strike against my beloved Sun-Times, but strike I will if a strike is called.'" He lamented that "Most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out." Regarding his own freedom of speech, he said: "I write op-ed columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, and people send me e-mails saying, 'You're a movie critic. You don't know anything about politics.' Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee.... I know a lot about politics."

Ebert was critical of intelligent design, and stated that people who believe in either creationism or New Age beliefs like crystal healing or astrology should not be president. He wrote that in Catholic school he learned of the "Theory of Evolution, which in its elegance and blinding obviousness became one of the pillars of my reasoning, explaining so many things in so many ways. It was an introduction not only to logic but to symbolism, thus opening a window into poetry, literature and the arts in general. All my life I have deplored those who interpret something only on its most simplistic level."

Ebert described himself as an agnostic on at least one occasion, but at other times explicitly rejected that designation; biographer Matt Singer wrote that Ebert opposed any categorization of his beliefs. In 2009, Ebert wrote that he did not "want [his] convictions reduced to a word," and stated, "I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist – which I am." He wrote: "I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer." He writes: "I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence."

He wrote of his Catholic upbringing: "I believed in the basic Church teachings because I thought they were correct, not because God wanted me to. In my mind, in the way I interpret them, I still live by them today. Not by the rules and regulations, but by the principles. For example, in the matter of abortion, I am pro-choice, but my personal choice would be to have nothing to do with an abortion, certainly not of a child of my own. I believe in free will, and believe I have no right to tell anyone else what to do. Above all, the state does not." He later wrote: "My choice is to not support abortion, except in cases of a clear-cut choice between the lives of the mother and child. A child conceived through incest or rape is innocent and deserves the right to be born."

He wrote: "I drank for many years in a tavern that had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it is this quotation, which I memorized: 'I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything concerned with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and the old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.' For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up." Summarizing his beliefs, Ebert wrote:

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out. He wrote: "I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh. Paul wrote that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself 'a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.' Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

On April 4, 2013, Ebert died at age 70 at a hospital in Chicago, shortly before he was set to return to his home and enter hospice care.

Barack Obama wrote, "For a generation of Americans — and especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies... [he could capture] the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical. ... The movies won't be the same without Roger." Martin Scorsese released a statement saying, "The death of Roger Ebert is an incalculable loss for movie culture and for film criticism. And it's a loss for me personally... there was a professional distance between us, but then I could talk to him much more freely than I could to other critics. Really, Roger was my friend. It's that simple."

Steven Spielberg stated that Ebert's "reviews went far deeper than simply thumbs up or thumbs down. He wrote with passion through a real knowledge of film and film history, and in doing so, helped many movies find their audiences... [He] put television criticism on the map." Celebrities paid tribute, including Christopher Nolan, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Jason Reitman, Ron Howard, Darren Aronofsky, Larry King, Cameron Crowe, Werner Herzog, Howard Stern, Steve Carell, Stephen Fry, Diablo Cody, Anna Kendrick, Jimmy Kimmel and Patton Oswalt.

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune recalled that "I came late to film criticism in Chicago, after writing about the theater. Roger loved the theater. His was a theatrical personality: a raconteur, a spinner of dinner-table stories, a man who was not shy about his accomplishments. But he made room in that theatrical, improbable, outsized life for others." Andrew O'Hehir of Salon wrote that "He's up there with Will Rogers, H. L. Mencken, A. J. Liebling and not too far short of Mark Twain as one of the great plainspoken commentators on American life."

Peter Debruge wrote "Ebert's negative reviews were invariably his most entertaining, and yet, he never insulted those who found something to admire in lesser films. Instead, he hoped to enlighten readers, challenging them to think, while whetting their appetite for stronger work ... It's a testament to Ebert's gift that, after a life spent writing about film, he made us love the movies all the more. ...I've always suspected the reason he settled into this profession is that film reviews, as he wrote them, served as a Trojan horse for the delivery of bigger philosophical ideas, of which he had an inexhaustible supply to share."

Hundreds of people attended the funeral Mass held at Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral on April 8, 2013, where Ebert was celebrated as a film critic, newspaperman, advocate for social justice, and husband. Father Michael Pfleger concluded the service with "the balconies of heaven are filled with angels singing 'Thumbs Up' ". Reverend John F. Costello of Loyola University delivered a homily for Ebert.

A nearly-three-hour public tribute, entitled Roger Ebert: A Celebration of Life, was held on April 11, 2013, at the Chicago Theatre. It featured in-person remembrances, video testimonials, video and film clips and gospel choirs, and was, according to the Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro, "a laughter- and sorrow-filled send-off from the entertainment and media worlds."

In September 2013, organizers in Champaign, Illinois, announced plans to raise $125,000 to build a life-size bronze statue of Roger Ebert in the town, which was unveiled in front of the Virginia Theatre at Ebertfest on April 24, 2014. The composition was selected by his widow, Chaz Ebert, and depicts Ebert sitting in the middle of three theater seats giving a "thumbs up."

The 2013 Toronto International Film Festival opened with a video tribute of Ebert at Roy Thomson Hall during the world premiere of The Fifth Estate. Chaz was in attendance to accept a plaque on Roger's behalf. At that festival, Errol Morris dedicated his film The Unknown Known to Ebert, saying "He was a really fabulous part of my life, a good friend, a champion, an inspiring writer. I loved Roger."

In August 2013, the Plaza Classic Film Festival in El Paso paid homage to Ebert by screening seven films that played a role in his life: Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Tokyo Story, La Dolce Vita, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Fitzcarraldo and Goodfellas.

Ebert received many awards during his long and distinguished career as a film critic and television host. He was the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, "for his film criticism during 1974". In 1993, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado.

In 2003, Ebert was honored by the American Society of Cinematographers, winning a Special Achievement Award. That same year, he was honored with a sidewalk plaque at the Chicago Theatre on the city-decreed "Roger Ebert Day". In 2009, Ebert received the Directors Guild of America Award's for Honorary Life Member Award.

In 2007, Ebert was honored by the Gotham Awards receiving a tribute and award for his lifetime contributions to independent film.

On January 31, 2009, Ebert was made an honorary member of the Directors Guild of America. On May 15, 2009, Ebert was honored by the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival by the renaming of its conference room, "The Roger Ebert Conference Center." Martin Scorsese joined Ebert and his wife Chaz at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

In 2010, Ebert received the Webby Award for Person of the Year, having found a voice on the Internet following his battle with cancer.

Each year from 1986 to 1998, Ebert published Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion (retitled Roger Ebert's Video Companion for its last five installments), which collected all of his movie reviews to that point. From 1999 to 2013 (except in 2008), Ebert instead published Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook, a collection of all of his movie reviews from the previous two and a half years. Both series also included yearly essays, interviews, and other writings. He also wrote the following books:

An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life (1967) – a history of the first 100 years of the University of Illinois. (no ISBN)

A Kiss Is Still a Kiss (1984) (ISBN 0-8362-7957-3)

The Perfect London Walk (1986), with Daniel Curley – a tour of London, Ebert's favorite foreign city. (ISBN 0-8362-7929-8)

Two Weeks In Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook (1987) – coverage of the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, which was also the 40th anniversary of the festival, plus comments about the previous 12 festivals Ebert had attended. Interviews with John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey and Isabella Rossellini. (ISBN 0-8362-7942-5)