Academy Award winning director Martin Scorsese took to the pages of the New York Times to pay tribute to Rob and Michele Singer Reinerpraising his sense of freedom, his comedic timing, and above all his luckiness to have been his friend. “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele. From now on, I’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness,” he wrote in the newspaper’s opinion section. “But there’s no other choice.”
The Reiners were found dead on December 14 in their Brentwood, Calif., home; their 32-year-old son, Nick, has been charged with their murder. The crime has sparked an outpouring of grief from the Reiners’ deep connections in the entertainment industry, with Billy Crystal, Larry Davidand Albert Brooks (among others) issuing a joint statement and others who worked with Reiner posting heartfelt tributes on social media.
In his New York Times tribute, Scorsese recounted how he first met Reiner in L.A. in the early 1970s, through a mutual friend. “Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room,” recalled Scorsese. “He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh. When they honored him at Lincoln Center, Michael McKean did a bit, which was a brilliant parody of solemn official tribute speeches. Before he got to the punchline, Rob laughed so hard you could hear it throughout the auditorium.”
Scorsese singled out two of Reiner’s films, calling Misery his favorite, “beautifully acted by Kathy Bates and James Caan,” and This is Spinal Tap. “Somehow, that picture is in a class of its own. It’s a kind of immaculate creation,” he said.
He recounted casting Reiner in his own 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Streetcasting him as Leonardo DiCaprio‘s father. “He could improvise with the best, he was a master at comedy, he worked beautifully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character,” wrote Scorsese, describing the role as “a loving father, mystified by his son.”
“I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved once again as we brought the scene together in the edit and moved as I watched the finished picture. Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes,” he said.
He concluded his tribute by calling their deaths an “obscenity, an abyss in lived reality,” he wrote. “The only thing that will help me to accept it is the passing of time.”
