Martin Scorsese recently mourned the passing of his friends Rob and Michele Reiner.
Martin Scorsese mourns their passing
In a new guest essay for The New York Times, the Oscar-winning director wrote, “What happened to Rob and Michele is an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality.”
The couple was found dead in their Los Angeles home on December 14th and their son Nick Reiner was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of his parents.
“Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele,” Scorsese began his essay. “From now on, I’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness.”
Scorsese noted that Rob, son of Carl and Estelle Reiner, “came from New York show business royalty.” Scorsese recalled getting to know the director of When Harry Met Sally… and his then-wife, Penny Marshall, in Los Angeles in the early 1970s at comedian George Memmoli’s gatherings.
“Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob,” wrote the Killers of the Flower Moon director.
“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. He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh.”
Scorsese also named Rob’s 1990 horror movie Misery as his favorite, and called his 1984 directorial debut This Is Spinal Tap “in a class of its own.” In Scorsese’s 2013 hit The Wolf of Wall Street, Rob played onscreen father to Leonardo DiCaprio, which included what the filmmaker called a “wonderful moment” involving Rob playing 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,” recalled Scorsese. “Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.”
Scorsese’s essay concluded with a poignant wish: “…that one day, I’ll be at a dinner or a party and find myself seated next to Rob, and I’ll hear his laugh and see his beatific face and laugh at his stories and relish his natural comic timing, and feel lucky all over again to have him as a friend.”
