Carl Reiner, the quintessential straight man for Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks who based beloved sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show on his own life and jump-started Steve Martin’s big-screen career, has died, his assistant Judy Nagy confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. He was 98.
The influential writer, director, actor, author and multiple Emmy Award-winner died Monday night at his Beverly Hills home of natural causes, Nagy said.
Son Rob Reiner, the actor, writer, director and Oscar-nominated producer, said in a tweet Tuesday morning: “Last night my dad passed away. As I write this my heart is hurting. He was my guiding light.”
TMZ first reported the news of his death.
Born in the Bronx, Reiner came to prominence in the 1950s as a performer and writer on Caesar’s legendary live variety programs Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, the wacky live primetime variety shows that also served as career springboards for Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Howard Morris, Imogene Coca and others.
From those writers rooms, he and Brooks began a lifelong friendship, and the two birthed one of the great two-man comedy routines of all time, The 2000 Year Old Man. The off-the-wall shtick yielded five comedy albums, TV appearances with Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen, a 1975 animated television special and a Grammy Award.
In 1959, after Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour, Reiner was being offered sitcom work but didn’t like any of the scripts he was reading. His late wife, Estelle, told him he could write a better one.
“I’d written a novel, Enter Laughing, but I’d never written a situation comedy,” he recalled in a 2011 interview with the WGA West. “And I remember talking to myself. … The question I asked myself at Franklin Roosevelt Drive and 96th Street was, ‘Reiner, what piece of ground do you stand on that no one else stands on? Write about that.’
“And I said, ‘Well, I live in [New York City suburb] New Rochelle. I’m married. I have two kids. I work in New York. I’m a writer on a television variety show, Your Show of Shows. Write about that.’ And that’s how Head of the Family, which would become The Dick Van Dyke Show, was born.”
Reiner wrote 13 episodes and then starred opposite Barbara Britton in the pilot, but with the television landscape then dominated by Westerns, every network passed on it. He was not eager to try again a year later, but producer Sheldon Leonard told him, “We’ll get a better actor to play you.”
That, of course, would be Dick Van Dyke, who portrayed the clumsy Rob Petrie. He worked with fellow comedy scribes Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) and Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) on the fictional Alan Brady Show, and Mary Tyler Moore, only 24 years old when the show premiered, played his wife, Laurie (Van Dyke was 35).
“Carl Reiner is the best writer in the world,” Van Dyke told David Steinberg on Showtime’s Inside Comedy. “He understood everyone’s way of speaking, the cadence, the intonation, everything. He wrote for everyone the way they talked. I didn’t have to act; all I had to do was read the lines. He was that good.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter