Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert, who has battled cancer in recent years, will undergo cancer surgery again, according to a published report.
In Thursday's Chicago Sun-Times, where Ebert has been the movie critic for nearly 40 years, columnist Robert Feder reported that Ebert will have surgery June 16 to remove a cancerous growth on his salivary gland.
“It's not life threatening, and I expect to make a full recovery,” the 63-year-old critic and host of the nationally syndicated movie review show “Ebert & Roeper” told Feder. “I'll continue to function as a film critic during this time.”
Ebert has undergone cancer surgery three times before — once in 2002 to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid gland and twice on his salivary gland the next year.
But Feder reported that Ebert is not expected to require radiation treatment as he did when he underwent the previous procedures.
“This is known as a slow-growing and persistent cancer,” Ebert said. “You live with it.”
Ebert recently returned from the Cannes Film Festival in France. He said he plans to tape enough shows with Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper that the program will continue to air during his recovery.
Ebert has been a film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, the same year he teamed up with Gene Siskel of the rival Chicago Tribune to launch their movie-review show. Siskel died in 1999.