Rob Reiner, dead at 78, remembered as Hollywood legend in his own right after following father’s footsteps

Rob Reiner, the son of a comedy giant, who went on to become one himself as one of the pre-eminent filmmakers of his generation, with movies such as The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men, has died. He was 78.

Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead Sunday at their home in the Brentwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles. A law enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed that Reiner, 78, and Singer, 68, were the victims.

Authorities were investigating an apparent homicide, said Capt. Mike Bland, with the Los Angeles Police Department. The Los Angeles Fire Department said it responded to a medical aid request shortly after 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.

For more than five decades, Reiner was a warm and gregarious presence in Hollywood. Like his first wife, Penny Marshall, he made the transition from television sitcom star to acclaimed feature film director — as well as becoming an outspoken liberal advocate.

The circumstances of the deaths left many inside and outside of the industry stunned.

“Rob was the big-hearted genius behind so many of the classic stories we love, with projects as wide-ranging as The Princess Bride to A Few Good Men,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “His boundless empathy made his stories timeless, teaching generations how to see goodness and righteousness in others — and encouraging us to dream bigger.”

Commercial and critical success

The son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, he began his career as a feature film director in the 1980s, churning out some of the most beloved films of that era. The 1984 rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as a fading hard rock band, was only a modest hit at the box office but gained currency as home video exploded, with its farcical scenes and quotable lines.

Reiner told the British Film Institute decades later that the film was almost entirely improvised, and his onscreen role as director was based in no small part on Martin Scorsese from the Band documentary, The Last Waltz.

This fall, Reiner directed the long-in-coming sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.

After the 1985 John Cusack summer comedy, The Sure Thing, Reiner’s directing career took a leap forward with the coming-of-age tale Stand By Me the following year — an adaptation of a Stephen King novella that earned two Golden Globe nominations and an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay.

“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,” he told actor-director Seth Rogen in Interview magazine’s September issue. “All I thought was, ‘I like this because I know what it feels like.'”

With his stock rising, Reiner devoted himself to adapting William Goldman’s 1973’s The Princess Bride, a book Reiner had loved since his father gave him a copy as a gift. The family-friendly film won the People’s Choice Award at the 1987 Toronto International Film Festival.

With When Harry Met Sally, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in 1989, Reiner enjoyed his biggest box-office smash up to that point, and it presaged a decade where his films took on more adult themes.

The famous line, “I’ll have what she’s having,” said after witnessing Ryan’s fake orgasm at Katz’s Delicatessen, was a suggestion by Crystal — but delivered by none other than Reiner’s mother, Estelle.

When Harry Met Sally was also the first of his films launched by Castle Rock Entertainment, the production company he co-founded two years earlier. In addition to his own films, Castle Rock helped produce a range of movies, from City Slickers to In The Line of Fire to Shawshank Redemption, as well as the television hit Seinfeld.

Misery, from 1990, was a critical and commercial hit for Reiner, earning actress Kathy Bates an Academy Award for best actress, with tough-guy actor James Caan playing against type as the subject of her obsessive fandom.

Reiner teamed with writer Aaron Sorkin for the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992) and The American President (1995). The films starred Hollywood heavyweights like Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas and earned about $350 million US at the box office. A Few Good Men earned four Oscar nominations.

“Rob Reiner is one of the most significant figures in the history of film and television,” Sean Astin, president of SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents actors and other film and television professionals, said in a statement. “The impact he made on American culture simply can’t be overstated. Tributes will pour in and the impossibly long list of genre defining films and indelible performances will play in our minds and hearts.”

There were flops in the 1990s, as well, highlighted by the putative comedy North, while the historical drama Ghosts of Mississippi, starring James Woods, Alec Baldwin and Whoopi Goldberg, did not make the impact its creators hoped.

“The studio didn’t think I was old enough to do the part, but Rob fought for me,” Woods, well known for conservative politics, said on X. “Political differences never stood in the way of our love and respect for each other. I am devastated by this terrible event.”

Outspoken liberal activist

Reiner was one of the film industry’s most passionate Democrat activists, regularly hosting fundraisers and campaigning for liberal issues. He was co-founder of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which challenged in court California’s ban on same-sex marriage, Proposition 8. He also chaired the campaign for Prop 10, a California initiative to fund early childhood development services with a tax on tobacco products.

That ran in the family, too. Reiner’s father opposed the Communist hunt of McCarthyism in the 1950s and his mother, a singer and actor, protested the Vietnam War.

Former U.S. president Barack Obama expressed his condolences, stating that “beneath all of the stories he produced was a deep belief in the goodness of people — and a lifelong commitment to putting that belief into action.”

“Together, he and his wife lived lives defined by purpose,” Obama said.

Two-time Emmy winner

Robert Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 6, 1947. As a young man, he quickly set out to follow his father into entertainment. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles film school and, in the 1960s, began appearing in small parts in various television shows, as well as the 1967 film directed by his father, Enter Laughing.

“If you’re a nepo baby, doors will open,” Reiner told the Guardian in 2024. “But you have to deliver. If you don’t deliver, the door will close just as fast as it opened.”

In a more recent interview, with 60 Minutes this fall, he said he idolized his father.

Reiner also worked behind the scenes, including on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where the writers’ room featured future onscreen notables Steve Martin and Bob (Super Dave) Einstein.

Reiner’s onscreen breakthrough came when he was cast, at 23, in Norman Lear’s All in the Family as Archie Bunker’s liberal son-in-law, Michael Stivic, derisively nicknamed Meathead by Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor.

Reiner was five times nominated for an Emmy for his performance on the show, winning in 1974 and 1978.

In Lear, Reiner also found a mentor and called him a second father.

“It wasn’t just that he hired me for All in the Family,” Reiner told 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 also helped launch Reiner as a filmmaker. He put $7.5 million of his own money to help finance Stand By Me.

Reiner made several dramedies as his career continued, with stars such as Bruce Willis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kevin Costner, Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson. He reunited with Nicholson for 2007’s The Bucket List, co-starring Morgan Freedom, and with Douglas seven years later with And So It Goes, co-starring Diane Keaton.

He then paired with actor Woody Harrelson on two films in 2016 and the following year — the presidential biopic LBJ, and the Iraq war drama Shock and Awe.

In addition to continuing to direct late in life, albeit with a less successful track record, he kept up with occasional onscreen roles, enlivening films like Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). In 2023, he directed a documentary focused on the actor-director friend he first met in his youth, called Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.

Reiner was married to Marshall, the actor and filmmaker, for 10 years beginning in 1971. Like Reiner, Marshall experienced sitcom fame, with Laverne & Shirley, but found a more lasting legacy behind the camera.

Reiner met Michele Singer, a photographer, on the set of When Harry Met Sally. In 1989, they were wed. They had three children together: Nick, Jake and Romy.

Being Charlie, a 2015 film Reiner directed, was co-written by Nick Reiner and informed by the son’s own history of drug addiction and homelessness. The film reunited Reiner with The Princess Bride star Cary Elwes.