Rob Reiner, the son of a comedy big who went on to develop into one, himself, as one of many preeminent filmmakers of his era with motion pictures reminiscent of “The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally …” and “This Is Spinal Tap,” has died.
Reiner and his spouse, Michele Singer, had been discovered lifeless Sunday at their house within the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles.
A legislation enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed that Reiner and Singer had been the victims. The official couldn’t publicly talk about particulars of the investigation and spoke to The Related Press on situation of anonymity.
Authorities had been investigating an “apparent homicide,” mentioned Capt. Mike Bland with the Los Angeles Police Division. The Los Angeles Fireplace Division mentioned it responded to a medical support request shortly after 3:30 p.m.
Reiner grew up thinking his father, Carl Reiner, didn’t understand him or find him funny. But the younger Reiner would in many ways follow in his father’s footsteps, working both in front and behind the camera, in comedies that stretched from broad sketch work to accomplished dramedies.
“My father thought, ‘Oh, my God, this poor kid is worried about being in the shadow of a famous father,’” Reiner said, recalling the temptation to change his name to “60 Minutes” in October. “And he says, ‘What do you want to change your name to?’ And I said, ‘Carl.’ I just wanted to be like him.”
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After starting out as a writer for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” Reiner’s breakthrough got here when he was, at age 23, forged in Norman Lear’s “All in the Family” as Archie Bunker’s liberal son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivic. However by the Nineteen Eighties, Reiner started as a characteristic movie director, churning out a few of the most beloved movies of that, or any, period. His first movie, the largely improvised 1984 cult traditional “This Is Spinal Tap,” stays the urtext mockumentary.
After the 1985 John Cusack summer time comedy, “The Sure Thing,” Reiner made “Stand By Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “When Harry Met Sally …” (1989), a four-year stretch that resulted in a trio of American classics, all of them among the many most frequently quoted motion pictures of the twentieth century.
A legacy on and off display
For the following 4 many years, Reiner, a heat and gregarious presence on display and an outspoken liberal advocate off it, remained a continuing fixture in Hollywood. The manufacturing firm he co-founded, Fortress Rock Entertainment, launched an enviable string of hits, together with “Seinfeld” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” By the flip of the century, its success price had fallen significantly, however Reiner revived it earlier this decade. This fall, Reiner and Fortress Rock launched the long-in-coming sequel “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.”
All of the whereas, Reiner was one of many movie trade’s most passionate Democrat activists, usually internet hosting fundraisers and campaigning for liberal points. He was co-founder of the American Basis for Equal Rights, which challenged in courtroom California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8. He additionally chaired the marketing campaign for Prop 10, a California initiative to fund early childhood improvement companies with a tax on tobacco merchandise. Reiner was additionally a critic of President Donald Trump.
That ran within the household, too. Reiner’s father opposed the Communist hunt of McCarthyism within the Nineteen Fifties and his mom, Estelle Reiner, a singer and actor, protested the Vietnam Battle.
“If you’re a nepo baby, doors will open,” Reiner informed the Guardian in 2024. “But you have to deliver. If you don’t deliver, the door will close just as fast as it opened.”
‘All in the Family’ to ‘Stand By Me’
Robert Reiner was born within the Bronx on March 6, 1947. As a younger man, he rapidly got down to observe his father into leisure. He studied on the College of California, Los Angeles movie college and, within the Sixties, started showing in small components in varied tv reveals.
However when Lear noticed Reiner as a key forged member in “All in the Family,” it got here as a shock to the elder Reiner.
“Norman says to my dad, ‘You know, this kid is really funny.’ And I think my dad said, ‘What? That kid? That kid? He’s sullen. He sits quiet. He doesn’t, you know, he’s not funny.’ He didn’t think I was anyway,” Reiner informed “60 Minutes.”
On “All in the Family,” Reiner served as a pivotal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted, conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner was 5 instances nominated for an Emmy for his efficiency on the present, profitable in 1974 and 1978. In Lear, Reiner additionally discovered a mentor. He referred to as him “a second father.”
“It wasn’t just that he hired me for ‘All in the Family,’” Reiner informed “American Masters” in 2005. “It was that I saw, in how he conducted his life, that there was room to be an activist as well. That you could use your celebrity, your good fortune, to help make some change.”
Lear additionally helped launch Reiner as a filmmaker. He put $7.5 million of his personal cash to assist finance “Stand By Me,” Reiner’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella “The Body.” The film, about 4 boys who go searching for the lifeless physique of a lacking boy, turned a coming-of-age traditional, made breakthroughs of its younger forged (notably River Phoenix) and even earned the reward of King.
Along with his inventory rising, Reiner devoted himself to adapting William Goldman’s 1973′s “The Princess Bride,” a e-book Reiner had liked since his father gave him a duplicate as a present. Everybody from François Truffaut to Robert Redford had thought of adapting Goldman’s e-book, however it finally fell to Reiner (from Goldman’s personal script) to seize the distinctive comedian tone of “The Princess Bride.” However solely as soon as he had Goldman’s blessing.
“At the door he greeted me and he said, ‘This is my baby. I want this on my tombstone. This is my favorite thing I’ve ever written in my life. What are you going to do with it?’” Reiner recalled in a Tv Academy interview. “And we sat down with him and started going through what I thought should be done with the film.”
Although solely a modest success in theaters, the film — starring Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, André the Large and Robin Wright — would develop in stature through the years, resulting in numerous impressions of Inigo Montoya’s vow of revenge and the dangerous nature of land wars in Asia.
’When Harry Met Sally …”
Reiner was married to Penny Marshall, the actor and filmmaker, for 10 years starting in 1971. Like Reiner, Marshall skilled sitcom fame, with “Laverne & Shirley,” however discovered a extra lasting legacy behind the digicam.
After their divorce, Reiner, at a lunch with Nora Ephron, prompt a comedy about relationship. In writing what turned “When Harry Met Sally …” Ephron and Reiner charted a relationship between a person and a lady (performed within the movie by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) over the course of 12 years.
Alongside the way in which, the film’s ending modified, as did a few of the movie’s indelible moments. The well-known line, “I’ll have what she’s having,” mentioned after witnessing Ryan’s pretend orgasm at Katz’s Delicatessen, was a suggestion by Crystal — delivered by none aside from Reiner’s mom, Estelle.
The film’s completely happy ending additionally had some real-life foundation. Reiner met Singer, a photographer, on the set of “When Harry Met Sally …” In 1989, they had been wed. They’d three kids collectively: Nick, Jake and Romy.
Reiner’s subsequent movies included one other King adaptation, “Misery” (1990) and a pair of Aaron Sorkin-penned dramas: the army courtroom story “A Few Good Men” (1992) and 1995’s “The American President.”
By the late ’90s, Reiner’s movies (1996’s “Ghosts of Mississippi,” 2007’s “The Bucket List”) now not had the identical success price. However he remained a frequent actor, typically memorably enlivening movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) and “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). In 2023, he directed the documentary “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.”
In an interview earlier this 12 months with Seth Rogen, Reiner prompt every thing in his profession boiled down to 1 factor.
“All I’ve ever done is say, ‘Is this something that is an extension of me?’ For ‘Stand by Me,’ I didn’t know if it was going to be successful or not. All I thought was, ‘I like this because I know what it feels like.’”
