Rob Reiner, who followed his father into show business, rose to prominence as an actor and ranged across Hollywood genres as the director of crowd-pleasing films including “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally… ,” was found dead Dec. 14 along with his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner. He was 78.
Their family confirmed the deaths in a statement, after the couple were found at their Los Angeles home in an apparent homicide. A Los Angeles Police Department spokesperson said Monday that the Reiners’ son Nick, 32, was arrested on murder charges.
The eldest son of comic writer and performer Carl Reiner, Mr. Reiner became a mainstay of 1970s television as a star of the CBS sitcom “All in the Family.” He won two Emmy Awards as Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the countercultural son-in-law to conservative patriarch Archie Bunker, and went on to an acclaimed career behind the camera, directing films that ranged from the coming-of-age story “Stand By Me” to the courtroom drama “A Few Good Men,” which brought him an Oscar nomination for best picture.
“He loves actors,” Tom Cruise, who starred as a military lawyer in the film, told the New York Times in 1992. “He loves what he’s doing. I’d catch him watching someone else’s close-up and he’d be mouthing the dialogue. He doesn’t even realize he does it. He’s a guy who wants, almost wills, his actors to be great.”
Outside his film and TV work, Mr. Reiner was known as a liberal political activist, championing the right to same-sex marriage and emerging as an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump. As he told it, he was inspired to venture into politics partly because of his role on “All in the Family,” with which he remained closely identified long after the show went off the air.
“I could win the Nobel Prize,” he joked in 2003, “and they’d write, ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.’ ”
A prolific filmmaker with an ear for memorable dialogue, Mr. Reiner didn’t stick to one genre as a director. He made his directorial debut in 1984 with the mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap,” which followed a fictional heavy metal group through the absurdities of the rock-and-roll lifestyle. Mr. Reiner improvised scenes alongside his friends Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, resulting in ludicrously funny lines, including one involving an unusually loud guitar amp.
“There’s barely a day that goes by that I don’t hear somebody say: ‘Well, let’s turn this up to 11. Oh, this goes up to 11.’ I’m watching sports, and they’ll say something like that,” Mr. Reiner told The Washington Post in September. “It’s a weird thing to know that something you created as just a little gag all of a sudden becomes part of the lexicon.”
While Mr. Reiner’s films often had a comedic bent, he was eager to experiment with new tones and angles. With 1985’s “The Sure Thing,” he tried out romantic comedy. His follow-up, “Stand By Me,” was somewhat darker, a Stephen King adaptation about a group of children who follow train tracks to find the body of a missing boy. Then came “The Princess Bride,” an adaptation of a fantasy-adventure novel by William Goldman that he loved.
“It’s an oddball movie, when you think about it,” Mr. Reiner said. “It’s got romance, it’s got swashbuckling, it’s got satire. The same movie that has these great sword fights has a guy saying, ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia.’ It’s a very weird, odd mix of things.”
In 1987, Mr. Reiner co-founded the production company Castle Rock Entertainment, which went on to produce one of the most successful sitcoms of its time, “Seinfeld,” as well as movies including “The Shawshank Redemption.” He had a hand in the company even as he directed a streak of classic films that included 1989’s Nora Ephron-penned rom-com “When Harry Met Sally… ,” which established him as “one of Hollywood’s very best directors of comedy,” as film critic Roger Ebert put it at the time.
Mr. Reiner met Michele Singer while working on the movie. Their romance inspired him to change the film, altering what was supposed to be a more downbeat conclusion, with echoes of “Annie Hall,” to a happy ending for the couple. The film was also personal in another way: Mr. Reiner’s mother, actress and singer Estelle Reiner, delivered the deadpan “I’ll have what she’s having” line during the diner scene.
Along with movies including “Flipped” and “And So It Goes,” “When Harry Met Sally…” was one of several that Mr. Reiner directed that explored his views of men and women, and what brings people together.
Women, he told The Post in 2014, are more emotionally developed and “are more evolved as people. They know what they want in life, and they know what’s important.” Men, he said, “run around like idiots until they find someone who can make them see what’s important and then they say, ‘Oh, I see.’ ”
“And basically, that’s the same story I’ve told over and over. I say it in different ways. But it’s this wonderful dance we do, no matter what age we are.”
A funny household
Robert Norman Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 6, 1947. Growing up in nearby New Rochelle, New York, he was surrounded by his father’s showbiz friends, including Sid Caesar, Norman Lear and Mel Brooks, with whom Carl Reiner formed a long-running comedy team.
“When you’re a kid, you just think your family is like every other,” Mr. Reiner said. “You don’t have anything to compare it to; you’re just living in that world. But then I’d go over to my friends’ houses and it wasn’t as funny over there.”
Growing up in the shadow of his father, a TV pioneer who created “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” wasn’t always easy. “I was just a strange kid to him,” Mr. Reiner told an interviewer in 2003. “He didn’t relate to me because he didn’t understand what this oddball kid was doing.” His most personal film, he said, was “Stand By Me,” “because it’s all about a young boy who thinks that his father doesn’t love him.” (Still, he added, he came to understand that the love was there: “Now we have a great relationship.”)
Mr. Reiner graduated from high school in Beverly Hills, where he discovered his love of acting in a drama class while performing alongside Richard Dreyfuss and Larry Bishop. The three of them later started a comedy troupe as students at UCLA. Another classmate, actor and comedian Albert Brooks, became the subject of one of Mr. Reiner’s final films as a director, the 2023 documentary “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.”
By the late 1960s, Mr. Reiner was appearing in bit parts on television — a delivery boy in “Batman,” a printer’s apprentice on “The Andy Griffith Show” — and collaborating with Steve Martin, whom he met while writing for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”
He married actress and director Penny Marshall, later known for starring on “Laverne & Shirley,” in 1971, just as he began playing Meathead on “All in the Family.” The couple had grown up across the street from each other in the Bronx but never met, and later connected while appearing in the ABC sitcom “The Odd Couple.” They divorced in 1981, but Reiner adopted Marshall’s daughter, Tracy, during their marriage and continued to be her father.
Eight years later, Mr. Reiner married Singer, a photographer who had taken the cover photo for Trump’s 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.” “She has a lot to atone for,” Mr. Reiner later joked.
The couple had three children, Jake, Nick and Romy. Mr. Reiner and his son Nick collaborated on the 2015 film “Being Charlie,” which was inspired by Nick’s history of drug addiction. “Making the movie dredged it all up again,” Mr. Reiner told the Los Angeles Times, adding that working on the film proved painful but only deepened his connection with his son.
“By the time we got to the point of making the movie it didn’t matter if we actually did,” he said. “Because our relationship had gotten so much closer.”
Mr. Reiner directed at a fast clip, putting out seven movies in the 1990s alone. He continued to bounce between genres that decade, notably trying his hand at horror with the Stephen King adaptation “Misery,” about a novelist (James Caan) held captive by a hammer-wielding fan. The film earned Kathy Bates an Academy Award for best actress.
After the success of “A Few Good Men,” starring Cruise, Mr. Reiner returned to the courtroom drama with “Ghosts of Mississippi.” He also popularized the concept of “The Bucket List,” with his 2007 buddy comedy of the same name, and explored his political interests in movies including “The American President,” featuring Michael Douglas as a widowed commander in chief, and “LBJ,” starring Woody Harrelson as the titular president.
A longtime Democrat, Mr. Reiner supported California state propositions to fund preschools and tax tobacco products, opposing public smoking so strongly that he was caricatured in an episode of “South Park.” He was cited as a potential candidate for California governor in 2006 and campaigned extensively for presidential candidates including Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
“Rob’s achievements in film and television gave us some of our most cherished stories on screen,” Obama wrote in a tribute on social media, adding that Mr. Reiner and his wife “will be remembered for the values they championed and the countless people they inspired.”
Mr. Reiner’s more than two-dozen feature films included duds such as “North,” a family comedy sometimes derided as one of the worst movies ever made. But he kept busy on both sides of the camera, appearing on-screen in films such as Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as the title character’s comically short-tempered father, and in TV shows including “New Girl.” Just this year, he directed a “Spinal Tap” sequel that reunited him with the film’s original cast and was a guest star on FX’s hit “The Bear.”
If his output had slowed somewhat as a director, it was only because he no longer had anything to prove.
“As you get older, all those dumb clichés, they’re all true,” he said in an interview with the A.V. Club in 2016. “You only have a certain amount of time left, and you should only spend it doing the things that you want to do.”
Harrison Smith contributed to this report.
correctionA previous version of this article misstated the year Rob Reiner joked in an interview about a Nobel Prize win. It was 2003, not 2023.
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