Joel Steven Siegel was an American film critic for the ABC morning news show Good Morning America for over 25 years.
18 Facts About Joel Siegel
2.
The winner of multiple Emmy Awards, Siegel worked as a radio disc jockey and an advertising copywriter.
3.
Joel Siegel's Romanian-born grandmother from Botosani survived the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in March 1911.
4.
Joel Siegel worked as a joke writer for Senator Robert F Kennedy and was at the Ambassador Hotel the night the senator was assassinated.
5.
Joel Siegel worked at a range of jobs throughout the 1960s, often concentrating on the civil rights movement.
6.
Joel Siegel began working in radio as a disc jockey and newscaster, while continuing to freelance in advertising.
7.
Joel Siegel created signature work teamed with a producer who later became an executive at WABC-TV's Eyewitness News.
8.
Joel Siegel proposed to Eyewitness News management that he become a film and theatre critic.
9.
Joel Siegel suggested that he would innovate the form by using brief clips from the movie or show being reviewed as drop-ins into his reviews, working them into his scripts as gags to create a new, witty form of review.
10.
In 1999, Joel Siegel was one of the many guest critics on Roger Ebert's show At The Movies as a replacement for Gene Siskel following his death.
11.
On June 21,1996, Joel Siegel married his fourth wife, artist Ena Swansea.
12.
One week after being diagnosed, Joel Siegel found out he would be a father for the first time.
13.
Joel Siegel wrote the book Lessons for Dylan which shares the ups and downs of his life with his young son, as he might not live long enough to relate those stories in person.
14.
Joel Siegel welcomed his newborn son, Dylan Thomas Jefferson Swansea Siegel, home on the same day he completed his chemotherapy treatments.
15.
Joel Siegel testified before the Senate during Colorectal Cancer Awareness month, March 2005.
16.
In June 2005, Joel Siegel published a letter in the peer-reviewed cancer medicine journal, The Oncologist entitled, "One at a Time".
17.
Joel Siegel died from metastatic colon cancer on June 29,2007 shortly before what would have been his 64th birthday.
18.
Joel Siegel received five New York Emmy Awards and a public service award from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the New York State Associated Press Broadcasters Association Award for general excellence in individual reporting.