Roger & Chaz

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Roger and Chaz on their wedding day

     “She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading.” 
- Roger Ebert
 

Ebert was 50 years old when he married Chaz Hammelsmith in 1992. After they married, Chaz resigned from her career as a lawyer and became vice president of the Ebert Company, handling business matters. Ebert admited, “I had no patience with business meetings or legal details. I had a weakness for signing things just to make them go away. She observed this, and defended me. It was a partnership.”

Together, the couple established Ebert’s legacy in the Champaign-Urbana area with the founding of Roger Ebert’s Film Festival (Ebertfest) and their endowment for the Roger Ebert Program in Film Studies in the College of Media at the University of Illinois. 

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16th Annual Ebertfest at the Virginia Theater, 2014

Roger and Chaz Ebert began Ebertfest in 1999 with the mission “to celebrate films, genres and formats that have been overlooked by distributors, audiences and/or critics.” Now an annual spring event, Ebertfest is held at the historic Virginia Theater in Champaign.  

In 2009, Roger and Chaz established the endowment for the Roger Ebert Program in Film Studies in the College of Media at the University of Illinois, including the creation of The Roger Ebert Center and the Ebert Fellowship in Media Criticism. When he and Chaz first established the endowment for the Program and Center in 2009, Ebert said, “The University of Illinois is deep in my heart as a great institution. It informed and enriched me... I hope when this Program and Center are fully realized, they will inspire new generations.”