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{Sky News 14 December} “US director and actor Rob Reiner and wife found dead 'with stab wounds' at his LA home”
Rest in peace, Rob and Michelle Reiner. I can scarcely summon the words—there is simply too much tragedy pressing in from every side—yet it is plain we have lost a great actor, a great director, and a great American. Rob Reiner was an indispensable presence in the single most significant and culturally consequential television sitcom ever produced, and then, with remarkable ease, he transformed himself into a filmmaker of true distinction. It was he who gave This Is Spinal Tap to the world—the ne plus ultra of satire and parody, a work so definitive it has never truly been surpassed (no, I have yet to see the new sequel, but shall make a point of it in the coming days).
Of Michelle Reiner I know less offhand, yet the fact that such fundamentally decent, talented people—individuals who contributed so much good to our troubled world—should meet their end in so harrowing a manner only deepens my sense of doom, my conviction that humanity is stumbling towards a darkness of its own making.
Copyright 2025, Arthur Newhook.
