The entertainment community–much of the entire world, in fact–is still numb over the circumstances regarding the death this past weekend of actor-turned-director Rob Reiner. The details to date are that Rob and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner were found dead, victims of an apparent homicide, in their Los Angeles home on Sunday afternoon. That his filmmaking career could end in such a brutal and unexpected manner serves as a bitterly ironic counterpoint to the humanity and heart that fueled Reiner’s body of work.
The son of another comedic polymath, Your Show of Shows alum Carl Reiner, Rob was born in the Bronx in 1947. Eventually moving with his family to Southern California, he graduated from Beverly Hills High School and studied film at UCLA. Looking to follow in his father’s footsteps, Rob was an apprentice at Pennsylvania’s famed Bucks County Playhouse in 1964 and later landed small acting roles on such shows as Wagon Train, Batman, That Girl, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Partridge Family (as Laurie’s biker beau, Snake). He also worked as a writer–in a bullpen that included Steve Martin and Bob “Super Dave” Einstein–on the Emmy-winning The Smothers Brothers Comedy Show. Rob’s big screen debut came in 1967’s Enter Laughing, a semi-autobiographical tale directed and co-written by dad Carl. Supporting turns in the cult comedy Where’s Poppa? (1970) and the anti-Vietnam War tale Summertree (1971), with a young Michael Douglas, followed.
1971 saw Reiner rise to national stardom as Michael “Meathead” Stivic, liberal college student son-in-law of Carroll O’Connor’s blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker, on the groundbreaking CBS sitcom All in the Family. Rob won two Supporting Actor Emmys for the role, but later lamented “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.'” He left the show at the end of Season Eight and moved to ABC, where he co-created and starred in a short-lived 1978 sitcom, Free Country.
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In the early 1980s Rob set his sights on directing feature films. Based on a rock band sketch they developed for a ’70s TV pilot, Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer turned the premise into 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap. The heavy metal pastiche was critically acclaimed but baffled audiences, who thought its on-screen group was real. Reiner proceeded over the next eight years to create a string of artistic and commercial successes: the teen romp The Sure Thing (1985); the coming-of-age tale Stand by Me (1986); the multilayered fantasy The Princess Bride (1987); the genre-defining romcom When Harry Met Sally… (1989); the Stephen King suspenser Misery (1990); and the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men (1992).
His winning streak ended with 1994’s family fable North, but he recovered with the 1995 White House-set romance The American President (starring old pal Michael Douglas), 1996’s Civil Rights Movement saga Ghosts of Mississippi, and the 1999 romance The Story of Us. When he wasn’t behind the camera, Reiner continued to act, with roles in Sleepless in Seattle, Bullets Over Broadway, The First Wives Club, Primary Colors, The Wolf of Wall Street, and more.
Rob returned to the romantic comedy field for 2003’s Alex & Emma and 2005’s Rumor Has It…, but both underperformed at the box office. More successful was the bittersweet 2007 buddy tale The Bucket List, with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. Reiner’s 2010s directorial works included The Magic of Belle Isle (2012), starring Freeman; And So It Goes (2014), featuring Douglas and Diane Keaton; the presidential biodrama LBJ (2016), with Woody Harrelson in the title role; and his final film, a reunion with Guest, McKean, and Shearer for this year’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
In 2011 Movies Unlimited’s annual catalog featured a selection of some of the best-loved film quotes of all time. It’s a relatively simple matter for cinema fans to come up with such a list comprised solely of dialogue from Rob Reiner’s oeuvre: “These go to 11.” “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” Hi, I’m Gary Cooper, but not the Gary Cooper that’s dead.” “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?” “As you wish!” “Hello, my name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die.” “I’ll have what she’s having.” “I’m your number one fan.” “You can’t handle the truth!” It is, to borrow another line from The Princess Bride, “inconceivable” that the list has now ended so abruptly and so tragically.