Always practical with his opinions, famous film critic Roger Joseph Ebert (1942-) was born on this day in Urbana, Illinois and was a movie fan as a child.

"We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds…by seeing the world as another person sees it," he explained.

A writer (1975) with the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, in 1975 Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize. That same year he teamed up with his rival at the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel, and launched their popular movie-review show.

For 23 years, he and the Siskel made film criticism mainstream and devised the thumbs-up, thumbs-down system of movie reviews. Their chemistry and one-upmanship were classic. Siskel died in 1999.

Ebert & Roeper and the Movies is one of the top-rated syndicated shows on television."It is all right to have opinions and express them; an amazing number of people will say something is "fine" because they think that's polite," Ebert said.

Always a journalist, Ebert published his first neighborhood newsletter at age 9. Six years later, he began his professional career as a sports writer for the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette.

Recovering from thyroid cancer in 2007, Ebert continued to write. He said that he does not take notes while viewing a film, then writes in a stream-of-consciousness style.

"I just write what I think," he explained. "I don't care what other people think."

Subjective or not, your opinion matters.