Howard Thompson (film critic)

Henry Howard Thompson Jr. ( born October 25, 1919 in Natchez, Mississippi, † March 10, 2002 in Cape Canaveral, Florida) was an American journalist and film critic.

Life

Henry Howard Thompson Jr. studied journalism at Louisiana State University. During the Second World War, he served as a paratrooper in the United States Army, where he was interned for about 6 months in a German POW camp. After the war, he studied journalism at Columbia University further. As the journalist Turner Catledge was a second cousin of him, he was given the opportunity in 1947 as an office boy and later working in the personnel department of the New York Times before he became Secretary of the film critic Bosley Crowther. Although he was already working as a full and independent reporter wrote articles and conducted interviews, Thompson began writing as a film critic during the mid- 1960s. Through its headings, which were often ironic one-liners, Thompson was known relatively quickly. He was at times the chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle.

1988 Thompson finally went after 51 years at the Times retire. His one-liners, he continued to write for the Critic's Choice column. After he survived a stroke in 1996, he moved in 1997 to Florida, where he died from the effects of pneumonia on March 10, 2002 at the age of 82.