“Hello” Roger Ebert – Born June 18 1942

Roger Ebert had the most-watched thumb in Hollywood.

With a twist of his wrist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic rendered decisions that influenced a nation of moviegoers and could sometimes make or break a film.

The heavy-set writer in the horn-rimmed glasses teamed up on television with Gene Siskel to create a format for criticism that proved enormously appealing in its simplicity: uncomplicated reviews that were both intelligent and accessible and didn’t talk down to ordinary movie fans.

Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, died Thursday at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago as he was getting ready to go home for hospice care, his wife, Chaz, said in a statement posted on his blog Thursday. He was 70.

Two days earlier, Ebert had announced he was undergoing radiation treatment for a recurrence of cancer .

“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.” Ebert wrote Tuesday on his blog.

Despite his wide influence, Ebert considered himself “beneath everything else a fan.”

“I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind,” Ebert wrote in his 2011 memoir titled “Life Itself.”

After cancer surgeries in 2006, Ebert lost portions of his jaw and the ability to eat, drink and speak. But he went back to writing full time and eventually even returned to television. In addition to his work for the Sun-Times, he became a prolific user of social media, connecting with hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and Twitter.

Ebert’s thumb