Gene Shalit, the film and book critic who made himself as famous as many of the stars he reviewed — through his explosion of dark hair, sprawling mustache, oversize glasses, and an unfailing ability to pack a pun into any sentence — died on Friday, June 12, 2026. He was 100. His family told NBC News he passed “after 100 years of an amazing life.”
Shalit spent four decades at NBC’s Today show, joining as a book reviewer in 1970 and stepping up as the program’s primary film critic in 1973 when he replaced Joe Garagiola on the desk. He worked alongside virtually every era of the show’s anchors — Hugh Downs, Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters, Bryant Gumbel, Jane Pauley, Matt Lauer, and Katie Couric — and never quite seemed to age into the background. Meredith Vieira’s assessment in a 2011 tribute captured the consensus: “He is the Today show.” Full obituaries at Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
His reviews were built around wordplay. When Ishtar arrived in 1987, Shalit disposed of it in two words before the pun landed: “Two words, Ishtar ish horrible.” When The Silence of the Lambs opened in 1992, he found a thread: it “may be all wool, and a yard wide, but it makes a terrific yarn.” Colleagues like Siskel and Ebert occasionally scoffed at the approach, but viewers did not. For a generation of Americans eating breakfast while the television ran, Shalit’s “Critic’s Corner” segment was how movies arrived in their living rooms. Katie Couric recalled his style with affection: “Gene was a master at doing celebrity interviews. He interviewed Sophia Loren and you could tell he was completely mesmerized by her.”
His face became iconic enough to be parodied on SpongeBob SquarePants (as a fish food critic named Gene Scallop), on Family Guy (four episodes), on Saturday Night Live (by Jon Lovitz and later Horatio Sanz), and on Second City Television, where Eugene Levy played him. In 1982, he took a cameo in Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie, completing a strange loop: the man who reviewed the movies appeared in one.
Shalit was born on March 25, 1926, in New York City, and spent most of his early life in New Jersey. He attended the University of Illinois, where he served as sports editor of The Daily Illini, before moving through public relations, entertainment columns, and eventually film criticism at Look magazine in 1968. He was also a radio presence: his daily NBC segment “Man About Anything” ran from 1969 to 1982. He retired from Today on November 11, 2010, with his characteristic understatement: “It’s enough already.”
He is survived by five children — Peter, Willa, Andrew, Nevin, and Amanda. A sixth child, Emily, died in 2012. His wife, Nancy Lewis, died of cancer in 1978; Shalit never remarried. On March 25, 2026, Today marked his 100th birthday with a Smucker’s jar segment delivered by Al Roker, a tradition the show reserves for its centenarians. He spent the occasion watching his beloved New York Mets.
For more on the entertainment figures making headlines this week, read Eastern Herald’s coverage of Taylor Swift becoming the youngest woman ever inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the passing of Peabo Bryson, the Grammy-winning voice behind Disney’s most enduring romantic duets.
