Joel Siegel (July 7, 1943 – June 29, 2007) was an American film critic for the ABC morning news show Good Morning America for over 25 years. Born to a Jewish family and raised in Los Angeles, California, he graduated cum laude from UCLA. During college, he worked to register black voters in Georgia, and he spoke frequently of having met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also worked as a joke writer for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and was at the Ambassador Hotel the night the senator was assassinated.
Death
Joel Siegel died of complications from colon cancer on June 29, 2007, in New York
Joel Siegel was 63 years old when he died.
In 1981 he joined "Good Morning America" as a film critic. While Siegel worked at his reviewing, he wrote the book for The First, a Broadway musical based on the story of Jackie Robinson, for which he received a Tony Award nomination in 1982.