Martin Scorsese mourns the loss of his friend and colleague Rob Reiner and his wife Michele.
In a guest essay for The New York Times, released on Christmas Day, Scorsese opened up about his relationship with the iconic director and actor. “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele. From now on I will have to use the past tense, and that fills me with deep sadness,” he wrote. “But there is no other choice.”
Rob, 78, and Michele, 70, died on December 14. They were found dead in their home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, “suffering from knife-like lacerations,” according to TMZ. The Reiners’ son, Nick, 32, was arrested and charged with his parents’ murder.
Both from the East Coast, Reiner and Scorsese met in Los Angeles in the early 1970s and became acquainted when they began attending meetings at George Memmoli’s house.
“Rob came from New York show business royalty. His mother, Estelle, was a wonderful singer and actress, and his father, Carl, was from Sid Caesar’s ‘Your Show of Shows.’ alongside Neil Simon and Mel Brooks, who would later become his partner on the brilliant “2000 Year Old Man” routine, wrote the Oscar-winning director. “It was 100% New York humor, and it was in the air I breathed.”
Scorsese continued to praise Reiner’s sense of humor. “Right away, I loved spending time with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes funny, but he was never the kind of guy who invaded the room. He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, enjoying life to the fullest in the moment, and he had a great laugh,” he wrote. “When they paid tribute to him at Lincoln Center, Michael McKean did a bit, which was a brilliant parody of the formal formal tribute speeches. Before he got to the punchline, Rob laughed so hard you could hear him throughout the auditorium.”
After years of admiring each other’s work, they were able to team up for the 2013 film. The Wolf of Wall Street. “I immediately thought of Rob to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s father,” Scorsese recalls. “He knew how to improvise with the best, he was a master of comedy, he worked wonderfully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character: the man loved his son, he was happy with his success, but he knew he was destined for downfall.”
“There’s this wonderful moment where Rob watches Jon Favreau explain to Leo that he can get away relatively unscathed if he just leaves his company before the SEC has a chance to charge him with violations. The look on Rob’s face, when he realizes that Leo is hesitating and ultimately won’t stop, is so telling. “You have all the money in the world,” he says. “You need everyone’s money?” loving father, mystified by his son, I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved again when we put the scene together in the edit, and moved as I watched the final image,” he continued “Now it breaks my heart just to think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this scene and others.”
Scorsese concluded his tribute: “What happened to Rob and Michele is an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality. The only thing that will help me accept it is the passage of time. So, like all their relatives and friends – and these were people with many, many friends – I must be allowed to imagine them alive and well… and that one day I will be at a dinner or party and find myself sitting next to Rob, and I will hear his laugh and see his smug face and laugh at his stories and savor his natural comedic timing, and feel lucky to have him as a friend again.
In addition to the Flower Moon Killers director Billy Crystal, Larry David, Martin Short, Demi Moore, Kathy Bates and many others paid tribute to Reiner.
