Gene Siskel Left, with Roger Ebert, 1986. Courtesy of AP Images.

Siskel, Gene (26 Jan. 1946-20 Feb. 1999), film critic, was born Eugene Kal Siskel in Chicago, the son of Nathan W. Siskel and Ida Kalis. He grew up, until age nine, in Rogers Park, a middle-class neighborhood on the city's North Side. With the deaths of their parents in 1955, the Siskel children were raised by their maternal aunt, Mae Gray, and her husband, Joseph, in suburban Glencoe, Illinois. Siskel prepared for college at Culver Military Academy, a boarding school in Culver, Indiana, graduating in 1963. He enrolled at Yale University, where he won a Coro Foundation Public Affairs Scholarship and majored in philosophy, earning a bachelor's degree in 1967. An army reservist, Siskel was called to active duty the follow year. He took courses in writing and editing at the U.S. Department of Defense Information School and produced press material for the armed services. He enjoyed this first experience with practical journalism so much that he decided to attempt a career at it, putting aside plans to attend law school.

In 1969 Siskel returned to Chicago and applied for a job at the Chicago Tribune, buttressing his résumé with a letter of recommendation from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Hersey, his teacher and mentor at Yale. Hired as a general reporter, Siskel received on-the-job training in the fundamentals of "police blotter" reporting. Some months later, learning that the Tribune's chief film critic was planning a leave of absence, he wrote a memo to his editor asking to be tried as a replacement. Knowing that this was a nervy request for a rookie reporter, Siskel argued the importance of having a young voice at the film desk capable of reaching the generation of readers who had grown up watching television and looked to the cinema for greater depth and complexity than older audiences. Offered the position on a temporary basis, Siskel held it for the rest of his life. His fine writing, which appeared daily in the Tribune for some thirty years, was often obscured by the glare of his television fame. His style demonstrated a mastery of the quintessential elements for success in reviewing movies on the pages of a mass-circulation newspaper: a plainspoken manner that sometimes challenged but never defied the understanding of readers; an encyclopedic knowledge, readily at hand, of the history, business, and art of cinema; and a love of movies that translated into enthusiasm for those films he liked and disappointment in the others.

With local television news programs expanding and experimenting during the 1970s, Siskel began offering film reviews in 1974 on the evening news for WBBM-TV, the CBS-owned station in Chicago. Before agreeing to this arrangement, the Tribune insisted that he always be introduced as "film critic of the Chicago Tribune." Siskel's relationship with CBS also lasted his lifetime, growing to include regular appearances on the network's nationally broadcast CBS This Morning program in 1990.

Siskel achieved an unprecedented level of influence for a U.S. film critic--and became a "household name" in the bargain--through his television partnership with Roger Ebert, his film critic counterpart at the rival Chicago Sun-Times. The two began working together in 1975 as costars of a local program, Opening at a Theater Near You, produced monthly at the Chicago public television station WTTW. They redesigned the form of film reviewing on television, breaking free of the talking-head cutaway that had become familiar on daily news programs. Using longer film clips, and sometimes multiple clips from the same film (all happily supplied by the studios in return for the free publicity), Siskel and Ebert turned the capsule review--often less than a minute long--into a half-hour discussion of new movies. Their conversation was animated by disagreements and even the occasional heated argument. One of Chicago public television's most-watched programs, the series expanded from monthly to weekly, supplementing coverage of new releases with special episodes focusing on film genres, the careers of directors, and other themes.

In 1978 the show, now titled Sneak Previews, was made available nationally via the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). It was the first series that WTTW ever produced for the network, and its instant success as the most highly rated program on PBS made Siskel and Ebert heroes to the Chicago broadcasting community, recalling the early days of the medium when Chicago had been a fertile source of innovative programming for the national commercial networks. Attempting to come up with a way of summarizing their recommendations that avoided the print tradition of awarding stars to pictures, Siskel and Ebert introduced what became their visual signature: a "thumb up" or "thumb down" from each. With a weekly television audience of millions, Siskel and Ebert became the most well-known--and widely followed--critics in history. "Two thumbs up" ensured almost any film--from a blockbuster to a small, independently made "art film"--greater business at the box office. For a significant number of viewers, Sneak Previews was the first public television series they had ever watched on a regular basis.

In 1982, having developed a communications product that outgrew the limited financial rewards of public television distribution, Siskel and Ebert took their program into commercial syndication as At the Movies. The title was changed to Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, and then simply Siskel & Ebert, as the failures of their imitators made it increasingly clear that their personal chemistry was at the heart of the show's success. Siskel tended to be the more intellectual of the two, while Ebert was more likely to enjoy the fun. For example, in their review of Stargate (1994), Siskel expressed outrage that it and other expensive science-fiction adventure films were so lacking in character development. Turning to Ebert he asked, "Do you know that the budget . . . was fifty-five million dollars?" "Boy, they must've had some great lunches," Ebert replied. But their differences were mostly a matter of style. Like most national TV personalities, they became celebrities, appearing singly or together on popular entertainment programs, and each was in demand on the college lecture and rubber chicken circuits. They produced one book, The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Speilberg, and George Lucas (1991).

While success and power can lead critics to identify too much with an establishment they should be scrutinizing, Siskel did not hesitate to express controversial opinions. He often criticized the Academy Awards, a Hollywood sacred cow, believing nominations could be bought with high-powered publicity campaigns. In 1991 he excoriated The Silence of the Lambs, a universally lauded winner of the Oscar for best picture, for excessive violence at the expense of character development. Siskel avoided private screenings in favor of seeing movies at regular theater showings, pointing out that the shared experiences of laughter, terror, and other reactions were at the heart of the cinematic experience. He nonetheless complained regularly about the distractions of crying babies, talking patrons, and crackling candy wrappers.

In 1980 Siskel married Marlene Iglitzen; the couple had three children. They were members of the Beth El Synagogue, a conservative congregation where Siskel had been bar mitzvahed, in the North Shore suburb of Highland Park. Active in Jewish affairs, Siskel was master of ceremonies at a 1998 Chicago celebration of Israel's fiftieth anniversary sponsored by the Jewish Federation. His children attended Jewish parochial schools, and he was a founder of Taam Yisrael, an organization that funds trips to Israel for Jewish eighth-graders. In 1994 Siskel refused to make a scheduled television appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show after the Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan had appeared on the program. In a Tribune column, Siskel criticized Hall for failing to question Farrakhan about a history of anti-Semitic statements. Siskel was also a lifelong lover of basketball and an ardent fan of the Chicago Bulls, rarely missing a home game and sometimes traveling to see the team play on the road.

After complaining of severe headaches, Siskel was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and underwent surgery in May 1998. He returned to the Siskel and Ebert television show several months later, but in February he underwent a second surgical procedure. He died two weeks later at an Evanston hospital. Siskel's funeral was attended by more than twelve hundred mourners. Members of the Chicago Bulls, some of whom counted Siskel as a personal friend, wore black sweatbands on the court in tribute. The Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago, which Siskel had long supported as a donor and advisory board member, was renamed the Gene Siskel Film Center in 2000.

The strength and breadth of intellect that Siskel brought to the consideration of a popular art put him squarely in an American critical tradition. Like the critics Gilbert Seldes, Waldo Frank, Richard Meltzer, and others, Siskel took seriously the job of using his skill and erudition to help millions of people get more out of the artistic experiences readily available to them. Of the many testimonials to Siskel that appeared in the press following his death, he might have been most pleased by a comment in the Boston Globe by a movie industry market researcher who marveled at how the opinions of Siskel and Ebert became factors in predicting a film's success. "The average person would look toward them about whether to take their hard-earned dollars to the box office," said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst with Exhibitor Relations Inc.

Obituaries are in the New York Times, 22 Feb. 1999, and the Boston Globe, 21 Feb. 1999. A detailed biographical sketch of Siskel is accessible online at Hollywood.com (http://www.hollywood.com/celebrity/Gene_Siskel/190684). An article concerning Siskel's Jewish identity, "Siskel Remembered As 'Mensch' Who Was Active in Judaism," by Brigitte Dayan, is available online from the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix (http://www.jewishaz.com/jewishnews/990226/siskel.shtml). A catalog of Siskel's appearances in entertainment programs and documentary films can be found at the Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com).