NEW YORK — Rex Reed, a film critic and journalist whose sharp-tongued writings appeared in the New York Daily News, died Tuesday in his Manhattan home. He was 87 years old.
William Kapfer, Reed’s longtime friend, confirmed his death. In a statement to the New York Times, the writer’s publicist, Sean Katz, added that Reed had a brief struggle with an unspecified illness before he died, though he did not provide further details.
His cause of death was not disclosed.
Born in Texas on Oct. 2, 1938, Reed went on to earn his degree in journalism at Louisiana State University before making a life-defining move to New York. He rose to prominence in the 1960s amid a new wave of reviewers, including Pauline Kael, who offered a more stylistic and conversational point of view in their writings. Reed in particular blended his sharp wit with a seeming nostalgia for Hollywood’s Golden Age, using it to both skewer and worship throughout the course of his lengthy career.
For more than six decades, Reed penned flashy film reviews, celebrity profiles and interviews with Hollywood and Broadway stars, helping to define pop culture in real time. Some of his hit profiles detail the likes of “Easy Rider’s” Peter Fonda, Barbra Streisand and Buster Keaton, though his most well-known is likely the one on Ava Gardner for Esquire in 1967.
Reed wrote of how a tipsy Gardner, who was once married to Frank Sinatra, spoke of her ex-husband’s subsequent marriage to Mia Farrow, “Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy,” she said to him.
In a profile the year prior for the New York Times, Reed took aim at Streisand for her extreme tardiness.
“Three-and-a-half hours late, she plods into the room, falls into a chair with her legs spread out, tears open a basket of fruit, bites into a green banana and says to the reporters, ‘OK, you’ve got 20 minutes,’” he wrote.
In addition to spending 13 years as the Daily News’ arts critic, Reeds’ writings were featured in GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair and Vogue as well as The New York Times. He has also penned film reviews and his “Talk of the Town” column for the New York Observer since the paper’s inception in 1987, though he was briefly laid off in 2017 before being rehired later the same year.
His final review for the Observer was for the film “Truth & Treason” in 2025.
Reed additionally authored eight books, including his best-known, “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” as well as “Conversations in the Raw,” “People Are Crazy Here” and “Valentines & Vitriol.”
In the 1980s he served as co-host of the syndicated television program “At the Movies,” and he was regularly a guest on the Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson talk shows, where he similarly offered his takes on Hollywood and Broadway. He even appeared in the gender-bending comedy “Myra Breckinridge” in which his character, Myron, transitioned to Raquel Welch’s Myra.
The movie was widely panned and Reed himself put it at the top of his own list of the 10 worst films of 1970.
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