page_title: Roger Ebert
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Roger Ebert / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Roger Ebert in May 2010
context_page_description: Roger Joseph Ebert was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. 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," Tom Van Riper of Forbes described him as "the most powerful pundit in America," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America."
  Ebert was known for his intimate, Midwestern writing voice 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 nonspecialist audiences. Despite being a populist, Ebert frequently endorsed foreign and independent films he believed would be appreciated by mainstream viewers, which often resulted in such films receiving greater exposure.
context_section_description: At age 50, Ebert married trial attorney Charlie "Chaz" Hammelsmith (formerly Chaz Hammel-Smith) in 1992. He explained in his memoir, Life Itself, that he "would never marry before [his] mother died," as he was afraid of displeasing her. In a July 2012 blog entry titled "Roger loves Chaz," Ebert wrote, "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." Chaz Ebert is now vice president of the Ebert Company and has emceed Ebertfest.
  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. He was a longtime friend of, and briefly dated, Oprah Winfrey, who credited him with persuading her to syndicate The Oprah Winfrey Show, which became the highest-rated talk show in American television history. He was also friends with film historian and critic Leonard Maltin and considered the book Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide (final update in 2014) to be the standard of film guide books.
  A supporter of the Democratic Party, Ebert publicly urged liberal filmmaker Michael Moore to give a politically charged acceptance speech at the Academy Awards: "I'd like to see Michael Moore get up there and let 'em have it with both barrels and really let loose and give them a real rabble-rousing speech." During a 1996 panel at the University of Colorado Boulder's Conference on World Affairs, Ebert coined the Boulder Pledge, by which he vowed never to purchase anything offered through the result of an unsolicited email message, or to forward chain emails or mass emails to others. Ebert endorsed Barack Obama for re-election as president in 2012.
  Ebert was critical of intelligent design, and stated that people who believe in either creationism or New Age beliefs such as crystal healing or astrology are not qualified to be president. Ebert also expressed disbelief in pseudoscientific or supernatural claims in general, calling them "woo-woo," though he has argued that reincarnation is possible from a "scientific, rationalist point of view."
  Discussing his beliefs, in 2009 Ebert wrote that he did not "want to provide a category for people to apply to [him]" because he "would 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." In the same blog entry, he also said "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." In March 2013, he wrote: "I support freedom of choice. 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 also stated: "I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock, and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself an atheist, however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable". He had previously identified as Catholic in his reviews of movies about Jesus, most notably in his review of Gibson's The Passion.
  On April 25, 2011, he achieved one of his long-time goals: winning one of the weekly cartoon-caption contests in The New Yorker after more than 100 attempts.
caption: Ebert in May 2010
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