Rob Reiner, One of Hollywood’s Greatest Filmmakers, Dies at 78

A legacy on and off screen

For the next four decades, Reiner, a warm and gregarious presence on screen and an outspoken liberal advocate off it, remained a constant fixture in Hollywood. The production company he co-founded, Castle Rock Entertainment, launched an enviable string of hits, including Seinfeld and The Shawshank Redemption. By the turn of the century, its success rate had fallen considerably, but Reiner revived it earlier this decade. This fall, Reiner and Castle Rock released the long-in-coming sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.

Reiner told AARP in September that Spinal Tap II was all about reinvention later in life.

"It basically says: No matter how old you are, if you can still do it and still enjoy doing it, then do it," he said.

Reiner was one of the film industry’s most passionate Democratic 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. Reiner was also a critic of President Donald Trump.

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

“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.”

From 'All in the Family’ to ‘Stand By Me’

Reiner, right, with his "All in the Family" castmates (from left) Jean Stapleton, Sally Struthers and Carroll O'Connor. The groundbreaking CBS sitcom launched Reiner's career.

CBS via Getty Images

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.

But when Lear saw Reiner as a key cast member in All in the Family, it came as a surprise 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 told “60 Minutes.”

On All in the Family, Reiner served as a pivotal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted, conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner was five times nominated for an Emmy for his performance on the show, winning in 1974 and 1978. In 2021, AARP named All in the Family one of the TV shows that changed America. Also that year, the show ranked No. 1 on AARP's list of the best sitcoms in TV history.

Reiner called Lear “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’s adaptation of Stephen King's novella The Body. The movie, about four boys who go looking for the dead body of a missing boy, became a coming-of-age classic, made breakthroughs of its young cast (particularly River Phoenix) and even earned the praise of King.

With his stock rising, Reiner devoted himself to adapting William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, a book Reiner had loved since his father gave him a copy as a gift. Everyone from François Truffaut to Robert Redford had considered adapting Goldman’s book, but it ultimately fell to Reiner (from Goldman’s own script) to capture the unique comic tone of The Princess Bride. But only once 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 Television Academy interview. “And we sat down with him and started going through what I thought should be done with the film.”

Though only a modest success in theaters, the movie — starring Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, André the Giant and Robin Wright — would grow in stature over the years, leading to countless impressions of Inigo Montoya’s vow of revenge and the risky nature of land wars in Asia.

Reiner, center, with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, the stars of 1989's "When Harry Met Sally ..." The romantic comedy remains one of Reiner's most popular movies.

Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Reiner’s films earned 11 Oscar nominations. Additionally, he won an AARP Movies for Grownups Best Intergenerational Film award in 2011 for Flipped, as well as a 2008 Movies for Grownups award for Best Buddy Picture for The Bucket List.

‘When Harry Met Sally ...’

Reiner was married to Penny 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.

After their divorce, Reiner, at a lunch with Nora Ephron, suggested a comedy about dating. In writing what became When Harry Met Sally …, Ephron and Reiner charted a relationship between a man and a woman (played in the film by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, named by AARP as one of the best on-screen movie couples of all time) over the course of 12 years.

“Nora Ephron was the prototype for Sally, and I was the prototype for Harry,” Reiner told AARP in 2014. 

Along the way, the movie’s ending changed, as did some of the film’s indelible moments. 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 — delivered by none other than Reiner’s mother, Estelle.

The movie’s happy ending also had some real-life basis. Reiner met 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.

Reiner’s subsequent films included another King adaptation, Misery (1990) and a pair of Aaron Sorkin-penned dramas: the military courtroom tale A Few Good Men (1992) and 1995’s The American President.

By the late ’90s, Reiner’s films (1996’s Ghosts of Mississippi, 2007’s The Bucket List) no longer had the same success rate. But he remained a frequent actor, often memorably enlivening films 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 year with Seth Rogen, Reiner suggested everything in his career boiled down to one thing.

“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.’”