Rob Reiner gave the world This Is Spinal Tap and Stand By Me and The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally and Misery and A Few Good Men — a run of films across a single decade that most directors would trade their entire career for and that Reiner produced with the particular creative generosity of someone who understood instinctively what audiences needed and trusted himself completely to give it to them.

He arrived in Hollywood as Archie Bunker’s son-in-law on All in the Family — Meathead, the liberal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s magnificent bigot, a role he played for seven seasons with a warmth and a comic intelligence that made him one of the most beloved figures on American television before he had directed a single frame of film. And then he stepped behind the camera and became something else entirely, something that the industry did not fully see coming and that the audience embraced with an immediacy and a totality that only happens when a filmmaker’s sensibility is so completely aligned with what people actually feel and actually need that the films stop being entertainment and start being something closer to shared experience. Almost no director has ever reached those heights, and almost everyone loved Reiner whether he was churning out classics or not — a director who lit up every soundstage he entered and who was beloved by cast and crew and audiences in equal and extraordinary measure. The films he made are permanent. The laughter he produced is permanent. The world he built on screen — full of love and friendship and the specific, irreplaceable joy of being fully, completely human — is permanent. Rob Reiner gave Hollywood its greatest moments. What he left behind will never be forgotten.