Charles Champlin

Charles Champlin, born in Hammondsport, New York, was a film critic and writer who spent seventeen years as a journalist at Life and Time magazines after graduating from Harvard in 1948. He moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1965 as its entertainment editor and columnist and served as the paper's main film critic from 1967 until 1980, also writing book reviews and a column called Critic at Large. He helped found the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and served on the board of the American Cinematheque. On television he hosted Film Odyssey on PBS from 1971, co-hosted the KCET public affairs program Citywatchers, and interviewed film figures for On the Film Scene and Champlin on Film. He taught film criticism at Loyola Marymount University and later at USC, and wrote several books. He died in 2014.