For the past 31 years (and counting), Gene Shalit has been a regular presence on NBC's Today. He has been reviewing motion pictures, plays, and books on television, radio, and in major magazines for 37 years.

His film reviews were a regular feature in Look Magazine. He wrote the What's Happening page for the Ladies Home Journal for 12 years. For a dozen years he wrote and broadcast a daily essay as Man About Anything on NBC's coast-to-coast radio network. Shalit was carried on more stations than was any other NBC network radio feature.

He has been a regular panelist on What's My Line? and To Tell The Truth, and has written articles for Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, Seventeen, Glamour, Look, McCall's, and The New York Times. 

Shalit has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston's Symphony Hall and Tanglewood…played his bassoon on stage in Lincoln Center...and conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a full concert of classical music. In none of these venues has he ever been invited back.

For national magazines and Today, he has interviewed scores of prominent personages in music, theater, and motion pictures, from The Grateful Dead to Sir James Galway to Steven Spielberg to Jessica Lange to Helen Hayes to Benny Goodman to Mstislav Rostropovich to Sophia Loren to Sophia Loren to Sophia Loren.

Shalit's rave-reviewed anthology of humor, Laughing Matters (DoubleDay, 1987), was a best seller. His Great Hollywood Wit (St. Martin's Press), was published in 2002.

Shalit was born in a New York hospital ever so long ago, and eight days later cut out for Newark, New Jersey, to be with his mother. In six years he fled to Morristown, New Jersey, where he was columnist for the high school paper and narrowly escaped expulsion. Shalit was graduated from the University of Illinois where he needed only six years to complete his four-year-course. While in school, he was an editor of the university broadsheet, The Daily Illini, a columnist for the Twin Cities' Champaign-Urbana Courier, and reported as a Big Ten sports stringer for the Associated Press.

He lives in Massachusetts with Fellini, his Maine coon cat named after the actress Marjorie Main. (To this day, it remains unclear whether the state added the e or Marjorie dropped hers.)

During major league baseball spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1994, Shalit was run over by a car. To the disappointment of many Hollywood producers, he recovered.

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