Gene Shalit, the beloved Today show movie critic known for his puns and an absent-minded professor image enhanced by a bushy mustache, has died, his family told NBC News on Friday, June 12. He was 100.

Shalit, who worked on Today for nearly four decades before retiring in 2010, “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life,” his family told NBC News, adding that his noteworthy tenure on Today was “an extraordinary era for him.”

“The Shalit family mourns the passing of our father/grandfather/uncle, Gene Shalit. Not only was he the Best Movie Critic Ever (in our unbiased opinion), he was the Best Dad Ever (in our unbiased opinion),” Shalit’s family said in a statement to PEOPLE. “With only the gentlest guidance he let each of his kids follow our own path, and he always let us know that his children were his proudest accomplishment. We will all miss his wit, his loving presence, and most of all his puns.”

Shalit turned 100 on March 25. The Today show celebrated by featuring him on a Smucker’s jar and sharing a recent photo of the critic. “He is ringing in 100 by enjoying that fresh air in the Berkshires with his six kids, five grandchildren,” Al Roker said.

Shalit was born Eugene Shalit in New York City in 1926, and was raised in New Jersey. He wrote for both his high school newspaper and for his college paper at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He graduated from college in 1949.

For a time, he worked as Dick Clark’s press agent, but left when Clark was called before Congress during their payola investigations in 1960. Clark told The New York Times Magazine in 2011 that Shalit was “a jellyfish” and that he never spoke to him again. Shalit eventually began working as a magazine writer.

Shalit began appearing on Today part-time in 1968 with his “Critics Corner” segment.

“He was a writer for the Ladies’ Home Journal and for Look magazine. He wrote a humor column,” his producer Guy Ludwig said in a 2010 interview with Today.

“And an executive here at NBC happened to read one of his columns and called up the Ladies’ Home Journal and said, ‘Mr. Shalit, do you talk anything like the way you write?'” Ludwig recalled, per the outlet. “And Gene said, ‘Well, I think so.’ He goes, ‘Well, come on down here.  We want to talk to you about broadcasting.’ ”

“And Gene looked in 1967 like he looks today,” Ludwig added at the time.

“Once Gene was on, he’d get letters like, ‘Who is this part-time anarchist that you have on television?’ because he was so different,” Ludwig told Today. But Ludwig said that Shalit’s “incredible wit” and “remarkable intelligence” shined through.

Shalit began with book reviews, appearing once a month, but by 1973 he was appearing full-time, a role he stayed in until 1995. In addition to his reviews, he also conducted interviews with celebrities, including a famed interview with Carol Channing where Shalit could not stop laughing.

Shalit was also known for using puns in his reviews, which were often just as based in humor as they were in criticism.

“The Silence of the Lambs may be all wool and a yard wide, but it makes a terrific yarn,” he said in his review of the 1991 horror classic, per NBC News.

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert began to change film criticism on TV in the ‘80s with their series At the Movies, they specifically named Shalit as who they did not want to emulate.

“We’re professional critics first, not TV performers,” Siskel told PEOPLE in 1984. “We don’t make jokes at the expense of the movies, like Gene Shalit, and we don’t do softball interviews — turning the camera on and letting the stars talk.”

In 2006, Shalit was condemned by GLAAD when he called Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in Brokeback Mountain a “sexual predator.” GLAAD said Shalit “used the occasion to promote defamatory antigay prejudice to a national audience.”

His son Peter, a gay physician who studied HIV/AIDS, replied in his own letter, writing, in part, “It is precisely because my dad is not homophobic that he felt free to criticize the movie as he saw it,” per The Advocate. In 1997, Shalit had written a letter in The Advocate about Peter, voicing his support for him and his partner of many years.

“Gene is not just a Today show treasure but a television legend and an American icon,” Jim Bell, then-executive producer of Today, said in a statement when Shalit retired in 2010. “We salute him for his unprecedented 40-year run on a single television program, a feat unlikely to ever be matched.”

“He was just spectacular in what he knew and who he knew,” Roker said of Shalit in 2022. He returned to Today once, in 2012, when Willard Scott retired.

Shalit’s pop culture reach was wide. He voiced a cartoon version of himself, Gene Scallop, on SpongeBob SquarePants. He was also parodied on Family Guy, Saturday Night Live and SCTV.

Shalit married Nancy Lewis in 1950. She died in 1978. They had six children, including artist Willa Shalit and Peter.

“When we were growing up, no one knew we existed,” Willa told PEOPLE in 1986. “My father kept us very private. At home there was a lot of reading, education and art, and a lot of ‘you can do anything you want.’ The concept of impossible was not in our vocabulary.”

Shalit’s daughter Emily was diagnosed with MS, and in 1993 he held the First Annual Gene Shalit Pro-Celebrity Billiards Classic for MS in her honor, per The New York Times.

Shalit is survived by his children.