Rob Reiner obituary: Hollywood director behind a golden run of 1980s and 90s classics

Profiling Rob Reiner for Film Comment in 1987, Harlan Jacobson described his subject as “a man who wants to be liked but sits anywhere he wants to”. For a commercial director like Reiner to warrant a feature in a magazine devoted to auteurs was unusual; the implication was that his powers of ingratiation belied a willingness to throw his bulk around a town where he’d grown up as comedy royalty. In an era of high concept, special-effects driven blockbusters, Reiner’s wiseacre, human-scaled comedies represented, if not a genuine bulwark of resistance, than at least some credible counterprogramming.

Without putting on airs (à la Woody Allen) or staking out a position as an iconoclast (like his pal Albert Brooks), Reiner’s 80s output mined a small but fertile patch of subversion. Beneath its expertly wrought backstage surfaces, what was This Is Spinal Tap (1984) but a swipe at overblown, corporatised 80s spectacle – a story of stadium-rock sellouts forced by their own delusions of grandeur to pay the (literal) piper (cue the pan-flute breakdown of ‘Stonehenge’)? 

Stand by Me (1986) was a Stephen King adaptation without any special effects, unless you count the wide, guileless eyes of River Phoenix, in one of the great young adult performances of its era; the great running joke of The Princess Bride (1987) was that its generic fairytale universe was shabby and fraying around the edges. “You can almost see the chalk marks it’s not hitting,” wrote Pauline Kael in her review, but like any enduring romantic fantasy, The Princess Bride understands the significance of sincerity over precision. There’s a reason that smitten high schoolers still recite dialogue from the film like oaths (or vows of love, as they wish). 

It may seem like damning with faint praise to say that these and other movies signed by Reiner during his decade-and-change reign as a Hollywood prestige-picture heavyweight – a stretch beginning with This Is Spinal Tap and extending to 1995’s The American President – were ‘likeable’. In the absence of any obvious stylistic continuity or thematic coherence (ie the tools of auteurism) it’s probably OK, however, to propose a vibes-based theory of directorial excellence. 

As an actor on the sitcom All in the Family (1971 to 1979), where he played the staunchly progressive, stubbornly combative son-in-law (Michael Stivic, aka ‘Meathead’) of Carroll O’Connor’s lovably bigoted Archie Hunker, Reiner had exuded an almost tactile sense of warmth, and when he got behind the camera, he seemed determined to draw out those qualities in his collaborators. The great trick of When Harry Met Sally… (1989) is that, in the home stretch, Billy Crystal transcends his pale, Woody-ish anhedonia to become a genuinely soulful romantic lead; when he arrives at that New Year’s Eve Party to plead his case to Meg Ryan, he’s almost dashing. The reason Kathy Bates earned her Best Actress Oscar for Misery (1990) lay in Reiner’s reluctance to reduce her and her multilayered performance to a slasher-movie cliché; her anguished flights over the cuckoo’s nest belie a real centre of gravity.

A case can be made that, on a technical level, 1992’s A Few Good Men – written by Aaron Sorkin and packaged around the ascendant stardom of Tom Cruise – represented Reiner’s best-ever piece of direction; the film is as crisp as a freshly starched pair of Navy Whites. All that pristine scenery is there for chewing, and Reiner got maximum mastication from his pal Jack Nicholson, whose performance as a malignantly narcissistic military commander proceeded straight into the bad-guy canon. As a mediation on the morality of the American military-industrial complex, A Few Good Men isn’t necessarily profound, but it nevertheless feels haloed in seriousness – a stretch for an inveterate jokester like Reiner, who clearly relished the chance to expand his skill set.  

A Few Good Men was the sort of solid-gold hit that meant its director could do pretty much anything he wanted. His choice of follow-up, the cameo-laden, globe-trotting coming-of-age-comedy North (1994) – based on a novel by Alan Zweibel, another old-school comedy writer who’d been on hand during Reiner’s standoff with Lorne Michaels while hosting Saturday Night – turned out to be sub-optimal. “I hated this movie,” wrote Roger Ebert; “Hated hated hated hated hated this movie.” So much for being likeable, then, and while Reiner continued to direct features into the 21st century, most of them were negligible – evidence that nobody made movies like his anymore, including Reiner himself. 

But he was still a terrific comic actor, as evidenced by his apoplectic shtick as Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). “Jordy, one of these days the chickens are going to come home to roost,” Reiner’s Max Belfort warns his junk-bond-slinging progeny; cast in a small role on The Bear (2022-), he channelled his eternal Meathead status into a restaurant consultation with dreams of being “Bigger than Arby’s”.

Reiner’s last role was in this year’s Spinal Tap: II The End Continues, reprising the character of Marty DiBergi – the ballcap-clad rockumentarian whose surname wryly mashed-up Marty and Steven. The movie isn’t a patch on its predecessor as far as Top 40 satire goes, but Reiner’s presence manifests – onscreen and behind the camera – in the palpable affection it displays for its wizened troupe of showbiz lifers. 

Back in the original Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest’s Nigel Tufnel had carped during a moment of graveside contemplation at Graceland that “there’s too much fucking perspective;” the wry, multifaceted humanity of that moment – and plenty of others plucked from Reiner’s best films – suggests the finesse of a filmmaker who could hit his marks when it mattered, and a body of work that will hold up in the longview.

• Rob Reiner, 6 March 1947 to 14 December 2025