Rob Reiner, the director of The Princess Bride whose last film went back to Spinal Tap

Rob Reiner

Photo: Montclair Film Festival / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 6, 1947 The Bronx, New York City, United States
Died	December 14, 2025 (78)
Occupation	Film director, actor and producer
Known for	Stand by Me, Misery, The Princess Bride
Awards	3 Emmy · Hugo · Toronto International Film Festival People's Choice Award, The Princess Bride · Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

In the last film he finished, Rob Reiner was back behind a camera pointed at three aging English rockers who never existed, playing the documentary maker Marty DiBergi exactly as he had in his first film as a director. Between those two films sat a coming-of-age drama carved out of a Stephen King novella, a fairy tale whole families can recite line by line, the romantic comedy the genre still measures itself against and a military courtroom drama nominated for Best Picture. Few American directors crossed that many genres without a visible signature, and the question his work leaves behind is whether that invisibility was his gift or the reason the second half of the career never caught up with the first.

Comedy was the family trade. He was the son of the actors Carl and Estelle Reiner, born in the Bronx and raised partly in New Rochelle before finishing school at Beverly Hills High. He studied at the UCLA film school and left without a degree; before long he was writing for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

Norman Lear then cast him, still in his early twenties (he was born on March 6, 1947), as Michael Stivic, the long-haired liberal son-in-law of Archie Bunker in All in the Family, the CBS sitcom that ran from 1971 to 1979 and put living-room arguments about race and class into prime time. Archie called him “Meathead”, the country followed suit, and the role brought Reiner two Primetime Emmy Awards. It also became a label he could not peel off. “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize’,” he once said.

The way out was the director’s chair. This Is Spinal Tap, in 1984, invented a heavy-metal band and filmed it as if it were real, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer improvising much of the material; its use of improvisation was unusual for a Hollywood film. What followed was one of the steadiest runs in American studio filmmaking. Stand by Me, in 1986, adapted King’s novella The Body. The Princess Bride, a year later, put William Goldman’s own adaptation of his novel on screen and won a Hugo Award. When Harry Met Sally…, written by Nora Ephron for Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, arrived in 1989; Misery in 1990, with a performance that won Kathy Bates the Academy Award for Best Actress; and A Few Good Men in 1992, Aaron Sorkin‘s courtroom showdown with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, which earned Reiner his only Oscar nomination, shared as a producer, for Best Picture.

The same years produced a business. In 1987 Reiner co-founded Castle Rock Entertainment with Alan Horn, Andrew Scheinman, Martin Shafer and Glenn Padnick, and the company went on to back Seinfeld on television and The Shawshank Redemption in cinemas before Turner Broadcasting bought it at the end of 1993. Three of his films, This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally…, are now in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.

Then came North. The 1994 comedy about a boy who divorces his parents was a box-office bomb, and critics tore into it, Roger Ebert with particular venom. The American President, again from a Sorkin script, steadied things a year later, but the decades that followed are usually told as a long fade: The Story of Us, Alex & Emma, Rumor Has It, The Magic of Belle Isle, And So It Goes. That story is too tidy. Reiner never had a house style to lose. His best films served writers with very strong voices, from King and Goldman to Ephron and Sorkin, and his talent lay in getting out of their way while keeping the actors honest. When the script was thin, nothing in his direction hid it.

The later work turned more personal. Being Charlie, in 2015, was co-written by his son Nick with Matt Elisofon and drew on Nick’s years in and out of rehab, something Reiner discussed openly while promoting the film. LBJ and Shock and Awe followed, then Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, a documentary portrait of an old friend. On screen he kept turning up in other people’s projects, as Jordan Belfort’s father in The Wolf of Wall Street, as Bob Day in New Girl and, late on, as the adviser Albert Schnur in The Bear.

Away from the set, he chaired the 1998 campaign for California’s Proposition 10, which created the early-childhood program First 5 California, and was its first chairman. He later co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which brought the federal challenge to California’s same-sex marriage ban. His first marriage, to Penny Marshall, lasted from 1971 to 1981, and he adopted her daughter, Tracy. He met the photographer Michele Singer while making When Harry Met Sally…, and she is credited with changing his mind about the film’s ending; they married in 1989 and had three children, Jake, Nick and Romy.

In September 2025 he released Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, directing, co-writing with Guest, McKean and Shearer, and stepping back into DiBergi’s cap. That summer he had also filmed the band at Stonehenge for a concert film, Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale, which Bleecker Street planned to release in 2026.

On December 14, 2025, Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found dead in their home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. He was 78. The county medical examiner ruled both deaths homicides. Their son Nick was arrested the same day and charged with two counts of first-degree murder; he has pleaded not guilty, the Los Angeles district attorney announced in September 2026 that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty, and a trial is not expected before 2027.

The work kept arriving after him. Billy Crystal led a tribute to the couple at the Academy Awards in March 2026. In July, HBO aired his final screen role, a cameo as George Washington in Larry David’s history sketch series Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, shot a month before his death. In September he won a posthumous Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for The Bear, his third, nearly five decades after the two for playing Meathead.

The Stonehenge film, put on hold after the deaths, still has no release date. Until it comes out, the last word in Reiner’s filmography belongs to the band he made up at the very start, and to the argument his best films keep making on every rewatch: that a director can be most present exactly where he is hardest to see.

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Tags: actors, Billy Crystal, Rob Reiner, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Nora Ephron

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