Rob Reiner, legendary director and actor, and his wife found dead in apparent homicide
The beloved and outspoken auteur died alongside his wife Michele Singer on Sunday
Rob Reiner, the legendary director and actor who rose to prominence in All in the Family and went on to direct the classic film comedies This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally…, died in his California home with his wife, Michele Singer, on Sunday. He was 78.
“It is with profound sorrow that we announce the tragic passing of Michele and Rob Reiner,” his family said in a statement. “We are heartbroken by this sudden loss, and we ask for privacy during this unbelievably difficult time.”
Police are treating the deaths as apparent homicides. According to the L.A. Times, authorities have questioned a member of Reiner’s family in connection with the death. As of Sunday night, the LAPD have not officially identified a suspect, but Rolling Stone has confirmed that Reiner’s son, Nick, was involved in the homicide. A source confirmed to Rolling Stone that the couple’s daughter, Romy, found her parents’ bodies.
The couple were found dead Sunday afternoon. Los Angeles Robbery Homicide Division detectives have been assigned to the case, NBC Los Angeles reports. Paramedics had been called to the home at around 3:30 p.m. and officers were dispatched after firefighters discovered a death.
“This is a devastating loss for our city and our country. Rob Reiner’s contributions reverberate throughout American culture and society, and he has improved countless lives through his creative work and advocacy fighting for social and economic justice,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass wrote. “An acclaimed actor, director, producer, writer, and engaged political activist, he always used his gifts in service of others.”
Born March 6, 1947 in New York, Reiner was the son of Carl Reiner, a giant in television and film comedy who created The Dick Van Dyke Show and directed The Jerk. When Rob Reiner set out to make his own name, he tried not to ride his father’s sizable coattails. “I didn’t take any money from him,” he recalled in 2016. “I didn’t take any advice. … I knew I was going to get that [nepotism] stuff. … But I knew in my head what I had done.”
While Reiner played several bit roles in popular television shows in the Sixties, including Batman and The Andy Griffith Show, and partnered with Steve Martin writing for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, his breakout role came in the Seventies playing the liberal Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the son-in-law of the cantankerous conservative Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) in Norman Lear’s hit sitcom, All in the Family, which ran from 1971 through 1979. Reiner won two Emmys for the portrayal.
During that time, he also guest starred on The Partridge Family and created the sitcom The Super, with Phil Mishkin and Gerry Isenberg, which aired in 1972.
But his artistic legacy was cemented by the string of wonderful, varied comedies he directed in the 1980s and nineties. With his 1984 debut This Is Spinal Tap, a mockumentary about a notoriously terrible U.K. metal band, Reiner worked with his stars and co-writers Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer to craft a heavily improvised film that made fun of rock-star egos and artistic pretensions. For Reiner, who was trying to make the leap from sitcom actor to movie director, the movie was a chance to prove himself to a sceptical industry.
“At that time,” he wrote in the 2025 book A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap, “there was a big chasm in Hollywood between those who worked in television and those who worked in movies. The film people were considered royalty. They looked down on the lowly peasants of TV. Today, actors, writers, and directors easily shuttle between movies and television. But it wasn’t until such sitcom alums as Ron Howard, Danny DeVito, Penny Marshall, and I, along with the TV writers Barry Levinson and Jim Brooks, were successfully directing movies in the Eighties that these dividing lines were erased.”
He followed This Is Spinal Tap with the 1985 romantic comedy The Sure Thing, starring relative unknown John Cusack, but his next five films were indelible. Adapting Stephen King’s novella The Body into Stand by Me, Reiner demonstrated his ability to elicit wonderfully lived-in performances from his young cast, which included Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell. The film launched their Hollywood careers and remains a beloved coming-of-age tale that Reiner once claimed was the film that meant the most to him.
“[I]t was the first time I did a movie that really reflected my personality,” he later said. “It has some melancholy in it, it has some emotion and it also has humor in it and the music was of my time… I think people relate to it. There’s a line at the end of the movie where they say, ‘You never have friends like you do when you are 12.’ And that’s a true thing. When you bond with your friends when you are 12 years old, it’s a very strong emotional bond.”
The next year, he tackled another adaptation, William Goldman’s fantasy book The Princess Bride, and showed he was just as capable at crafting a tender, funny fairytale. As with his previous movies, The Princess Bride wasn’t simply popular but proved to be a warehouse for endlessly quotable lines: “Have fun storming the castle!” “Inconceivable!” These early hits catered to all ages, but with his 1989 film, When Harry Met Sally…, he produced one of the period’s wisest, most grownup romantic comedies.
Working from Nora Ephron’s flawless script, Reiner told the story of two platonic friends, Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan), who eventually discover that they love each other. When Harry Met Sally… took the urban sophistication of Woody Allen’s best New York love stories and married it to contemporary concerns about relationships and, of course, faking orgasms. (The movie’s infamous scene with Ryan faking it in a restaurant was capped with Reiner’s own mother Estelle saying the key line: “I’ll have what she’s having.”)
Reiner didn’t just master comedies: His 1990 adaptation of King’s bestselling novel Misery won Kathy Bates an Oscar for terrorizing James Caan’s poor novelist Paul Sheldon. Although darkly funny, Misery was also legitimately scary, further illustrating Reiner’s ability to know how to produce excellent mainstream Hollywood entertainment.
That roll continued with 1992’s A Few Good Men, with Aaron Sorkin adapting his own play for a live-wire courtroom drama highlighted by terrific performances from, among others, Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, whose momentous “You can’t handle the truth!” showdown was just one more example of Reiner conjuring up instant-classic moments in his box-office hits.
In the midst of this incredible run, he was unfailingly modest about his talents. “I’m not great at anything, but I’m real good at a lot of things,” he told Film Comment in 1987. “I’m a pretty good actor, a pretty good writer, I have pretty good music abilities, pretty good visual and color and costume sense. I’m not great at any of these things, but as a director I have the opportunity to utilize all these things in one job. Which is why I like doing it. … I pick people who are creative and gentle and are willing to struggle along with me a little bit if I’m not exactly sure. People say it’s a real sin for a director to ever admit he doesn’t know what he wants. But I’m as confused as the next guy.”
Reiner would knock out one last indisputable gem, the 1995 White House rom-com The American President. But if his career never contained another movie that captured the public’s imagination, he continued to make films on myriad topics, focusing chiefly on political issues he cared about. An outspoken liberal who criticized George W. Bush and Donald Trump, he turned that anger at the country’s right-ward direction into pictures such as LBJ and Shock and Awe, which were provocations meant to inspire everyday Americans to look more closely at their government.
He would occasionally return to acting, agreeing to a recurring role in New Girl. Reiner appeared in movies like 1987’s Throw Momma From the Train and 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle, and he was delightful in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street playing the father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s unscrupulous stockbroker Jordan Belfort. And he enjoyed spoofing his own leftie image, playing himself as Rep. Rob Reiner in a memorable episode of 30 Rock.
Most recently, he made his first sequel, directing Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which arrived in theaters in September. He reunited with Shearer, McKean, and Guest, reprising his role as clueless documentarian Marty DiBergi. Reiner and his stars had long resisted the temptation to make a Part Two. “We never even considered it,” he wrote in A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever. “Why fuck with a classic? … But after a few more meetings, we saw that we still made each other laugh.”
Despite the wealth of enduring favorites Reiner directed, he was only nominated for one Oscar (Best Picture for A Few Good Men). But the endless rewatchability of his best movies speaks to what he achieved as a mainstream filmmaker, blending craft, smarts, heart, and humor in a way few directors managed.
Asked what makes a “Rob Reiner film” by 60 Minutes in 1994, Reiner explained that it was hard to categorize given his range of films, but “the main character in the film is always going through something that I’ve experienced or am experiencing, and I try to make it as personal as possible,” he said.
“It’s the only way I know how to tell a story,” he continued. “I didn’t come through the film schools. I’m an actor, and I approach it from, can I inhabit the insides of this character? Can I be this person? And if I can, then I know how to tell the story of what that person is going through. And I also know how to tell the actor who’s playing that part, how to play the part.”