Roger Ebert hasn't eaten since 2006

Television's most famous movie critic is rarely seen and never heard, says Esquire in a nicely detailed piece by Chris Jones, but Roger Ebert is still reviewing movies, blogging and tweeting. (He loved Pedro Almodovar's "Broken Embraces.") Surgeries for cancer of the jaw and a busted carotid artery sentenced him to a new kind of life.

Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can't remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn't happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn't as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz's ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren't they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.

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He is a wonderful writer, and today he is producing the best work of his life. In 1975 he became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer prize, but his TV fame saw most of his fans, at least those outside Chicago, forget that he was a writer if they ever did know.

Ebert is a MacBook Pro man, incidentally. Here's his Chicago Sun-Times blog and his Twitter feed.

Photo: Esquire