Beloved Filmmaker Rob Reiner Dies at 78

“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 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’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.’”