NEW YORK — Gene Shalit, a movie critic and arts reporter for the “Today” show over four decades who was known for his puffy hair, oversized handlebar mustache and affection for groan-inducing puns, has died. He was 100.
Shalit’s family announced the death Friday to NBC News, saying in a statement that he “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life.”
Shalit joined “Today” as a contributor in 1970 and became arts editor in 1973, later settling in for his segment, “Critic’s Corner.” When he left the show in 2010, he was one of the last high-profile film critics on a major network.
“What resonated above his unusual appearance was his incredible wit, his remarkable intelligence. But he didn’t pound you over the head with it. He amused you. He enlightened and amused whatever subject he was on,” Guy Ludwig, Shalit’s producer for more than 20 years, wrote in an essay of his time.
It was no coincidence that Chicago critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s local “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” movie-review program, “Sneak Previews,” went national on PBS in the late 1970s and that “Today” show’s ABC rival, “Good Morning America,” hired Joel Siegel to be its movie critic in 1981.
“Shalit was instrumental in changing the balance of critical power in America. When he began his ‘Today’ tenure, newspapers and magazines were the primary sources for movie reviews. That’s where cinematic opinion was sparked and shaped,” The Plain Dealer wrote in 2010, calling Shalit “Daniel Boone in a bow tie and Groucho glasses.”
Magazine work led to NBC offer
Shalit started as an entertainment columnist for McCall’s magazine, eventually becoming senior film critic for Look magazine in 1968 and writing for Ladies’ Home Journal. His popularity in magazines led to an offer from NBC.
“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?'” wrote Ludwig. “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 the air, Shalit was a middle-of-the-road critic. Of 1986’s classic “Stand By Me,” he said it was different from other movies about youth “because of instead of grossing you out, ‘Stand by You’ is engrossing.”
“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.
Highlights in words
He liked “Defiance” starring Daniel Craig and Jude Law, calling it “a vivid dramatization of one of history’s titanic turning points.” But he called “Brokeback Mountain “wildly overpraised, but not by me” and drew condemnation from GLAAD for calling Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jack, a “sexual predator.” Shalit apologized.
He called “Frozen” “very cool.” He said the oddball title of “The Men Who Stare at Goats” was “heard to bleat,” and his review of “The Lovely Bones” read in part: “There’s no bones about it.”
He began reviewing on the air the year of “Patton” and “Love Story” and ended his run with a critique of “Shrek Forever After,” of which he noted that the “bellow fellow is now a mellow fellow.” One highlight of this tenure was his descent into a fit of giggles while interviewing Carol Channing.
He called a remake of “King Kong” so “gargantuan that I must create new words to describe it: fabularious … a brilliantological humongousness of marvelosity.” His take on Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”: “It should be against the law not to see it.”
In a 1981 interview with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, Belushi said Shalit’s hair looked like “an ant farm on fire.” Nevertheless, he peppered his guest with so many questions about their daily life that it felt like therapy. He asked both comedians what their last meals would be. “What do you want to be doing 10 years from now, John Belushi?” Shalit asked. “‘Fiddler on the Roof'” Belushi replied.
During his tenure, he traded quips with anchors ranging from Edwin Newman, Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley to Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Jane Pauley, Al Roker and Meredith Vieira.
Gumbel was not always a fan, once saying Shalit’s reviews “are often late and his interviews aren’t very good.” The critique came in what was supposed to be a confidential memo to Marty Ryan, the show’s executive producer at the time.
In 1994, while in St. Pete Beach, Florida, to cover Major League Baseball spring training, a car hit Shalit as he was crossing a street and broke his leg. After that, “Today” began recording his movie reviews in his home studio.
Early life
He was born in New York and grew up in Morristown, New Jersey, starting his grammar school’s first newspaper before writing a humor column for the newspaper while a student at Morristown High School. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949.
Shalit played the bassoon, but he said he started out on the clarinet.
“I didn’t practice for a few weeks and the teacher got furious,” he recalled in 1988, before playing bassoon in a New York City fundraiser. “He took away my clarinet and as punishment he said, ‘From now on, you’re gonna play THIS.'”
In 1987, he edited a book called “Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor,” saying he wanted to introduce and reintroduce such old and new masters of American humor as Mark Twain, James Thurber and Russell Baker.
Shalit was regularly mocked on “Saturday Night Live” by cast member Horatio Sanz, who would appear on the Weekend Update desk dressed as Shalit and go on an extended, barely coherent rants that punned the title of every movie he reviewed. Shalit also made cameos on “Sesame Street,” “Family Guy” and “Spongebob Squarepants.”

Gene Shalit, the Muppet look-alike who reviewed movies and other cultural arts with a whimsical bent and a shtick for puns as the resident wit on NBC’s “Today” show for four decades, one of the longest tenures on an American television program, died on Friday at 100.
NBC reported the death, citing a family statement. No further details were immediately available.
For millions of Americans tuned in to the “Today” potpourri of news, interviews, entertainment and weather, a dose of literate, wacky commentary from Mr. Shalit’s “Critic’s Corner,” often with cackles of appreciation for his own incorrigibility, was as much a part of the morning as a cup of coffee.
“‘Ishtar’ ish tarrible!” Mr. Shalit concluded in a review of Elaine May’s 1987 comedy about two lounge singers looking for work in Morocco and stumbling into Cold War machinations.
After seeing “The Longest Yard,” a 1974 flick in which Burt Reynolds organizes a prison football team, he suggested: “This movie should be penalized half the distance to the goal — twice.”
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The person in control of Nick Reiner’s trust initially refused to pay out money until an investigation was complete, according to Nick’s lawyer.
TMZ obtained a letter written by Nick’s lawyer on May 11 that was sent to the trustee of Nick’s trust, which was set up by Rob and Michele Reiner.
The trust holds around $1.7 million, per the docs. In his petition, Nick’s lawyer demanded the money to distribute the cut he was owed when he turned 30, two years before he allegedly murdered his parents in their L.A. home.
Nick’s lawyer claimed the trustee could not even confirm whether the payment was made … “There is no reason … the trustee should not yet know whether half the trust was distributed two years ago.”
In addition, Nick’s lawyer claimed the trustee told her that an investigation needed to be done to determine whether the “Trust requires or leaves to the trustee the discretion to make a distribution at age 30.”
“We are not sure what you are investigating,” the letter read. Nick’s lawyer said the trust was set up with clear instructions … and said Nick’s money needed to be turned over ASAP to help him hire a criminal defense lawyer. Nick told the court he wanted to re-hire Alan Jackson to defend him in court.
Nick’s lawyer also asked the trustee to explain if they were withholding the money due to “incompetence” … which his lawyer said was BS … because there was no written statement of incompetence by two licensed physicians, which was required by the trust if the trustee was going to rely on that argument.

In the new season of AMC’s cult horror series Interview With the Vampire (now rechristened The Vampire Lestat), the eponymous vamp is setting the record straight — or, at least, attempting to.
After his ex-lover Louis (Jacob Anderson) publishes a best-selling book exposing the ups and downs of their century-long romance, Lestat (Sam Reid) responds in kind by commandeering his neighborhood garage band and hitting the road with a catalog of all-new rock songs erratically chronicling his side of the story.
Composer Daniel Hart, who evocatively scored the first two seasons of the show, was tapped to write 20-plus original songs this go-around — a task that mined his experience touring alongside musicians like David Bowie, Radiohead and more. He also took on an active role in the writers’ room. In fall of 2024, to get everyone on the same page about the character’s musical reference points, Hart curated an inspiration playlist for Reid and showrunner Rolin Jones, a truncated version of which he is exclusively sharing with Billboard.
“The original playlist was longer than this one,” he recalls. “But going back through it now — on the other side of making The Vampire Lestat — provided some clarity as to which songs from the original playlist were most important to our creative process.”
Himself a composer born in the 18th century, Lestat’s witnessed many eras of music come and go — so his influences prove just as motley. “There is a fair amount of genre-jumping at play here,” Hart says. “That was intentional. We needed Lestat’s music to evolve stylistically throughout the season, as he went on his odyssey.” Because while glam rock serves as an aesthetic bedrock for our preening immortal, as chaos begins to unfold, the reopened wounds of his storied life lead Lestat down a rawer and more introspective path.
EPs featuring the songs from new episodes will be rolling out weekly — so, until the complete soundtrack is available to stream, Hart is giving a taste of what’s to come below.
“It’s not necessarily a one-for-one playlist,” he adds. “If you put these songs and Lestat’s songs side by side, you won’t always hear direct correlations. But I tried to pick songs for Rolin and Sam — and now for you — that would show both the breadth of Lestat’s compositional abilities, and songs that were imbued with the kind of structure or showmanship I was chasing after in my own writing.”

Gene Shalit, the longtime film critic for Today, known for his quirky puns and signature walrus mustache, has died. He was 100.
His family tells NBC News in a statement that Shalit passed away peacefully on Friday “after 100 years of an amazing life.”
Shalit began his long career at The Today Show in 1970, where he began part-time and became a contributor three years later.
Known for his frequent use of puns and his comical “absent-minded professor” appearance, which included a handlebar mustache, fuzzy hair, large glasses and colorful bow ties, Shalit became one of the most recognizable faces on television.
During his four-decade tenure at Today as film and book critic, Shalit reviewed thousands of films, many of which were generally positive assessments, which frequently drew criticism from his peers for his lack of rigor, evidenced in parodies by rival film critics such as Siskel & Ebert.
His review of the 1980 horror film The Shining is considered by many to be his most notable. Veering away from the consensus, he panned the film shortly after its release, criticizing it for lacking the depth and scariness expected from a major Stephen King adaptation and failing to live up to its hype.
Shalit announced that he would leave The Today Show after 40 years, effective Nov. 11, 2010. He was quoted at the time as saying “it’s enough already” about his retirement.
Born March 25, 1926 in New York City to parents of Jewish descent, Shalit and his mother briefly moved later that year to Newark, New Jersey, before the family permanently relocated to Morristown, New Jersey, in 1932.
He discovered his passion for writing while attending Morristown High School, where he penned a humor column for the student newspaper, a style which eventually morphed into his pun-heavy, comedic styling that would define his career in later years.
Prior to his long stint on Today, Shalit began writing for print publications in the 1960s, such as Look magazine, a 12-year stint at Ladies’ Home Journal, as well as Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, Seventeen, Glamour, McCall’s and The New York Times.
Over the years, Shalit became synonymous with pop culture. He guest-starred as the voice, and was portrayed in the form of a fish food critic named ‘Gene Scallop’ in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode ‘The Krusty Sponge’. He also was parodied in several episodes of Family Guy, including ‘Family Guy Viewer Mail #1’, ‘Brian Sings and Swings’, ‘The Book of Joe’ and ‘Big Man on Hippocampus’, although he was not a voice actor for the series.
Shalit also voiced a character inspired by himself in three episodes of the animated series The Critic. Additionally, he was portrayed several times on Second City Television by cast member Eugene Levy.
Shalit turned 100 on March 25, 2026, a milestone that was commemorated on Today in a special segment, in which Al Roker sent birthday wishes using a personalized Smucker’s jar, a reference to Shalit’s association with the brand through earlier promotions. Shalit was surrounded by his family for the occasion and said he looked forward to watching his favorite baseball team, the New York Mets.