“Martin Scorsese is mourning the loss of his friend and colleague, Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. In a guest essay for The New York Times, published 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’ll”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
In a guest essay for The New York Times, published 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’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness,” he wrote. “But there’s no other choice.”
Rob, 78, and Michele, 70, died on Dec. 14. They were found dead in their Brentwood, Los Angeles, home “suffering lacerations consistent with a knife,” according to TMZ. Reiner’s son, Nick, 32, has been arrested and charged in the killings of his parents.
Both from the East Coast, Reiner and Scorsese met in Los Angeles in the early 1970s and got to know each other when they started attending get-togethers at George Memmoli’s home.
“Rob came from New York show business royalty. His mother, Estelle, was a wonderful singer and actress, and his father, Carl, came out of Sid Caesar’s ‘Your Show of Shows’ alongside Neil Simon and Mel Brooks, who later became his partner with the brilliant ‘2000 Year Old Man’ routine, the Oscar-winning director wrote. “This was 100 percent New York humor, and it was in the air I breathed.”
Scorsese continued to praise Reiner’s sense of humor. “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. He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh,” he wrote. “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.”
After years of admiring each other’s work, they got to team up for 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “I immediately thought of Rob to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s father,” Scorsese recalled. “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: The man loved his son, he was happy with his success, but he knew that he was destined for a fall.”
“There’s that wonderful moment where Rob watches as Jon Favreau explains to Leo that he can get out relatively unscathed if he just walks away from his company before the SEC has a chance to charge him with violations. The look on Rob’s face, as he realizes that Leo is hesitating and that he ultimately won’t stop, is so eloquent. “You got all the money in the world,” he says. “You need everybody else’s money?” 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,” he continued. “Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.”
Scorsese ended his tribute: “What happened to Rob and Michele is an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality. The only thing that will help me to accept it is the passing of time. So, like all of their loved ones and their friends — and these were people with many, many friends — I have to be allowed to imagine them alive and well … and 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.”
In addition to the Killers of the Flower Moon director, Billy Crystal, Larry David, Martin Short, Demi Moore, Kathy Bates and more have paid tribute to Reiner.