Los Angeles: Pun-spouting movie critic Gene Shalit, a fixture on NBC’s Today show for 40 years in his bow ties and extravagantly bushy hair and moustache, died on Friday at the age of 100, NBC News reported, citing a family statement shared with the network.

Shalit started on Today in 1970 and became its arts editor in 1973, interviewing celebrities and reviewing books as well as films. His role on the show was reduced in his later years and he retired at age 84 in 2010, saying, “It’s enough already.” Shalit was quick to laugh, and his schtick-laden Critic’s Corner segments on Today brimmed with ebullience. With big glasses, dark frizzy hair sticking out several inches from his head and a massive mustache bisecting his face, he looked like a lost Marx brother.

Shalit strove to be as entertaining as the movies he critiqued and did not mind being corny. His reviews were full of pithy comments that a Hollywood studio could easily repurpose for positive advertising blurbs. For a 2005 remake of King Kong, Shalit said conventional vocabulary would not suffice so he called it “fabularious” and “a brilliantological humongousness of marvelosity.”

Shalit stirred controversy in 2005 when he described one of the main characters in the acclaimed Brokeback Mountain the story of a romance between two cowboys as a “sexual predator.”

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2026