April 3, 1953

"TV Guide" was published for the first time. The cover was a photo of Lucille Ball's infant Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV. 

April 4, 1973

NBC aired the Elvis Presley Movie "Aloha From Hawaii." 

April 4, 2013

Legendary movie critic Roger Ebert dies.

Born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Illinois, Ebert was the only child of an electrician father and bookkeeper mother. At age 15, Ebert he began writing about high school sports for his local newspaper. In 1964, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where majored in journalism and served as editor of the school's newspaper. Two years later, he went to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. When the paper's film critic retired in 1967, Ebert was named as her replacement.

Ebert's column soon became a must-read for movie lovers, and in 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. That same year, he and rival critic Gene Siskel, of The Chicago Tribune, were paired as co-hosts of a monthly movie-review show, "Opening Soon at a Theater Near You," on Chicago’s public broadcasting station. In 1978, the show, renamed "Sneak Previews," went into national syndication, and later became the highest-rated half-hour series in the history of public television. In the early 1980s, the program was acquired by another broadcasting company and rechristened "At the Movies." Its name was changed to "Siskel & Ebert at the Movies" in 1986, the same year the two hosts, who became known for their sometimes contentious on-screen chemistry, debuted their thumbs-up, thumbs-down judgments. The program helped turn Siskel and Ebert into some of the planet's most powerful film critics as well as celebrities in their own right. After Siskel died in 1999 at age 53 from a brain tumor, Ebert selected his Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper as his new co-host and the program was rechristened "At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper."

Ebert reportedly watched 500 movies a year and penned reviews of at least half that many on an annual basis. (In 2012, when asked to name the 10 greatest films of all time, his list included such titles as "Apocalypse Now," "Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull" and "Vertigo.") His work was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers around the world, and he was the author of more than 15 books, including the acclaimed 2011 memoir "Life Itself." Ebert had a brief foray into movie making when he wrote the script for 1970’s "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." Upon its release, the film was trashed by critics, including Siskel.

Diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002 and salivary gland cancer the following year, Ebert lost the ability to speak, drink and eat in 2006 following surgery for jaw cancer.  However, he continued to work, writing for the Sun-Times, blogging for his own website and developing a large following on Facebook and Twitter. On April 2, 2013, Ebert publicly announced he would be writing fewer reviews due to a recurrence of cancer. He died two days later. The Sun-Times published his final movie review on April 6, for "To the Wonder." Ebert awarded it 3.5 out of 4 stars.

April 5, 2008

Charlton Heston dies at the age of 84.

With his leading-man status confirmed, Heston went on to star in other notable films for Hollywood’s best directors. In 1958, he played a Mexican narcotics detective in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, appearing opposite Welles himself. Another biblical epic, Ben-Hur (1959), directed by William Wyler, won a then-record 11 Academy Awards (a mark that was later tied by Titanic in 1998 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004). Heston took home an Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of a rebellious young aristocrat in ancient Judea.

In all, Heston would appear in some 100 movies on the big and small screens over the course of his lengthy career. He played the title character in the Spanish medieval epic El Cid (1961), opposite Sophia Loren, and was panned by critics for his turn as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965). He portrayed Mark Antony in both Julius Caesar (1970) and Antony and Cleopatra (1973); he also directed the latter film. Heston also made forays into the Western genre (1968’s Willy Penny), science fiction (the 1968 hit The Planet of the Apes and its 1970 sequel, 1971’s Omega Man and 1973’s Soylent Green), and highbrow literary adaptations (1972’s The Call of the Wild and 1973’s The Three Musketeers). His later work for cable television included A Man for All Seasons (1988) and The Avenging Angel (1995).

Long active in political and social causes, Heston publicly supported the civil rights movement and participated in the historic march on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. In 1966, Heston succeeded his friend and fellow actor Ronald Reagan as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a post he would hold until 1971. He also served as chairman of the American Film Institute from 1973 to 1983. After Reagan won the U.S. presidency in 1980, he appointed Heston as the co-chairman of a task force on arts and humanities. In this role, Heston defended National Endowment for the Arts and proved to be an effective speaker and public figure.

According to his obituary in The New York Times, Heston switched his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 1987, after the Democrats blocked the Supreme Court appointment of Robert Bork, a conservative whom Heston supported. Over the next decade, Heston began increasingly to speak out about what he saw as a decline of morality in American popular culture and entertainment. In 1996, he campaigned on behalf of various Republican candidates. He began focusing specifically on the opposition to gun control. After being elected vice president of the NRA in 1997, he became president the following year.

Heston parlayed his rugged onscreen persona into a forceful role at the head of the NRA’s campaign against what it saw as the federal government’s attempts to encroach on the constitutional right to bear arms. In 2000, he made a memorable speech at the NRA’s annual convention, bringing his audience to their feet with the rousing claim that gun-control advocates would have to pry his gun “from my cold, dead hands!” Meanwhile, Heston continued acting through the 1990s, making one of his final film appearances (uncredited) in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes.

April 7, 1978

The final episode, number 37, of Black Sheep Squadron aired on NBC.