Versatile actor, writer and ‘nice genius’
Carl Reiner, who has died aged 98, was a writer, performer and director who successfully surfed several waves of comedy talent, collaborating with the likes of Mel Brooks and Steve Martin over a long and varied career.
He came to prominence as the comedian Sid Caesar’s sidekick on Your Show of Shows (1950-54), picking up two Emmy awards for his supporting work on
Caesar’s Hour (1954-57). A third pairing,
Sid Caesar Invites You (1958), was less successful, but Reiner went on to carve out his own corner of television history by creating the much-loved The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66), winning a further five Emmys. (He would take home nine over his career, including a comeback gong in 1995 for his guest appearance on the sitcom Mad About You.)
Versatility was the key to Reiner’s professional survival. He moved on to become a stage and film actor, a screenwriter and latterly a film director, a role in which he met with mixed fortunes.
‘‘Reiner’s facility for anarchic, silly comedy is rarely enough on its own to sustain a film,’’ noted one critic, ‘‘resulting in an output of mainly slaphappy unevenness which at worst deteriorates into an abysmal mess.’’ One of his final directorial efforts, the Kirstie Alley vehicle Sibling Rivalry (1990), was panned as ‘‘a redundant, leaden farce’’.
He was more reliable as a supporting actor, taking prominent roles in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966). He made his directorial debut the following year on the film adaptation of his own semiautobiographical novel Enter Laughing (1967).
As a director, Reiner made four films in five years with Steve Martin, starting with the enduring The Jerk (1979), in which Reiner also appeared, followed by
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), which he co-wrote. Arguably the most effective was The Man with Two Brains (1983), a sci-fi spoof in which Reiner offered full rein to Martin’s brand of absurd, deadpan silliness.
Reiner’s eccentric 1989 film Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool was conceived as a vehicle for the British actor Robert Lindsay, cast after his Me and My Girl stage success, as an all-singing, all-dancing northern coalminer inspired by a love of old musicals to try his luck in Hollywood. Reiner drew a splendidly over-the-top performance from Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks’s wife, as a fading star.
Subsequent directorial efforts – including the noir pastiche Fatal Instinct (1993) and the Bette Midler vehicle That Old Feeling (1997) – died swift deaths at the box office, suggesting Reiner had lost his comic touch. Yet again he found a new audience upon signing up to play Saul Bloom, a canny old confidence trickster with an ulcer, coaxed out of retirement to bring his gift for impersonation to the heist crew led by George Clooney in the blockbuster caper Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its two sequels.
Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx district of New York to a watchmaker, Irving Reiner, and his wife Bessie. He graduated from the Evander Childs High School when he was 16, abandoning an ambition to play pro baseball to take a job as a machine shop assistant; he soon identified acting as an alternative escape route, took drama lessons and joined a small theatrical troupe.
During World War II he served in the US Army, where his acting abilities were harnessed in revues for GIs stationed in the South Pacific. After being demobbed, he was cast in the Broadway revues Call Me Mister (1946) and Inside USA (1948).
Reiner’s third Broadway outing was in Alive and Kicking (1950), for which one of the backers was Max Liebman, the producer-director of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Liebman booked him as Caesar’s television sidekick, enabling Reiner to bring his buffoonery to bear on a variety of roles, from a Confederate soldier to a latter-day commuter. Caesar praised Reiner’s sterling qualities as his ‘‘second banana’’, pointing out: ‘‘Such bananas don’t grow on trees.’’
During his nine-year spell with Caesar, Reiner also worked with Mel Brooks on a series of recordings featuring Brooks’s character known as The 2000-Year-Old Man – a cranky Jewish rascal who claimed to have dated Joan of Arc (‘‘what a cutie’’) and have 42,000 children (‘‘and not one comes to visit me’’) .
The first of their five albums, released in the 1960s, influenced a generation of comedians, including Bill Cosby, Billy Crystal, Albert Brooks and Paul Reiser.
Reiner played the eager, probing questioner who tried to elicit pearls of wisdom any average listener would want to know from a man who was 2000 years old, played by Brooks.
Reiner: ‘‘You knew Jesus?’’ Brooks: ‘‘Yes, yes. Thin lad, wore sandals . . . Always walked around with 12 other guys . . . They used to come into the store a lot. Never bought anything.’’
Reiner made his film debut as a lawyer in The Gazebo (1959), and played another attorney in Happy Anniversary (also 1959). That summer, he moved from New York to California to become a regular writer on The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1957-61), but his efforts to pitch a sitcom idea devised with the actor Peter Lawford were rejected by networks, leading him to bemoan the lack of originality in television comedy.
In 1961, however, he found his feet as a writer, devising and scripting The Dick Van Dyke Show, noted for its unusually sophisticated badinage. The show made stars not only of one-time game show host Van Dyke, but also his sidekick, the thenunknown Mary Tyler Moore. Reiner produced, directed and eventually appeared in the show.
He returned to television comedy in later life, appearing as a caller on Frasier
(1993), as himself on The Larry Sanders Show (1997), providing a voice (and writing an episode knowingly titled ‘‘Your Show of Shows’’) for The Cleveland Show (2010-11), and becoming a regular guest star on Two and a Half Men
(2009-14).
A 2012 episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee revealed that Reiner maintained a nightly ritual, started in 1950, of having his old friend Mel Brooks over to his house to eat dinner and watch the quiz show Jeopardy!
He received the Mark Twain Award for American Humour in 2000, and remained prolific with the pen, following up Enter Laughing with Continue Laughing (1996), and going on to write a trio of memoirs, My Anecdotal Life (2003),
I Remember Me (2013) and Too Busy to Die
(2017). ‘‘I’m a charming coward,’’ he insisted. ‘‘I fight with words.’’
In 2018, Reiner said he hoped to ‘‘stick around’’ to ‘‘put the Trumpster in the dumpster’’. Americans, he said, were being lied to ‘‘every single day about everything’’.
He added: ‘‘In my 96-and-a-half years,
‘‘In my 96-and-a-half years, I’ve seen a lot of things. But the one thing I cannot bear to see is America being destroyed by racism, fearmongering and lies.’’ Carl Reiner in 2018
I’ve seen a lot of things. But the one thing I cannot bear to see is America being destroyed by racism, fear-mongering and lies.
‘‘My personal goal will be to stick around until 2020 and vote to make sure we have a decent, moral, law-abiding citizen in Washington who will make us all proud again to live in America.’’
Reiner’s last credited role was providing the voice of Carl Reineroceros in Toy Story 4 (2019). ‘‘To be represented by a cute little toy character is not the worst thing in the world,’’ he observed.
Reiner is survived by the three children he fathered with the jazz singer Estelle Lebost, to whom he was married from 1943 until her death in 2008: the filmmakers Rob and Lucas Reiner, and the performer and therapist Annie Reiner, described by her father as ‘‘the world’s greatest singing psychoanalyst’’.
Billy Crystal wrote in the foreword to Reiner’s I Remember Me: ‘‘I’ve always looked at his career as one of the best ever and one of the most important . . . He didn’t have to be a star. Always willing to be second if it helped the team finish first, Carl has never had an air about him. He is what he is: a nice genius.’’ – Telegraph Group/Washington Post