It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Urbana native, and esteemed film critic, Roger Ebert.
Roger Joseph Ebert, was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Ill. He attended Urbana High School and the University of Illinois.
The first movie he saw was the 1937 Marx Brothers comedy, “A Day at the Races,” at the Princess Theater in Urbana. “It was part of a double feature shown with five cartoons, and you got four and a half hours of solid entertainment for exactly nine cents,” Mr. Ebert once recalled. He was in elementary school when he started his journalistic career, publishing The Washington Street News in his basement and delivering copies to his neighbors. He edited his high school paper and by age 15 was covering high school sports for The News Gazette in Champaign. Ebert graduated as a journalism major from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964, where he was editor of The Daily Illini.
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