Pauline Kael died on September 3, 2001, at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, after suffering from Parkinson's disease.
Pauline Kael died on September 3, 2001, at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, following a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. She was 82 years old.
By the time of her death, Kael had long retired from active reviewing—she stepped down from The New Yorker in 1991—but her influence on film criticism and American cultural discourse remained immense. Obituaries across major publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, credited her with fundamentally transforming film criticism from a genteel, often dismissive pastime into a vigorous, intellectually serious, and passionately personal art form in its own right.
Her death marked the end of an era in American criticism. Generations of writers—dubbed the "Paulettes"—had been mentored, encouraged, or fiercely opposed by her, and her collected reviews continued to be read as essential texts in film studies programs. Directors such as Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg publicly acknowledged her role in shaping both their careers and the broader critical culture that surrounded American cinema in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s.
Kael's legacy endures through her voluminous body of published work, later reissued in the compendium The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (2011), part of the prestigious Library of America series—an honor rarely bestowed upon a film critic.