- - Inside Rob Reiner and Albert Brooks' 60-Year Friendship: 'I've Always Looked Up to You'

Gillian TellingDecember 17, 2025 at 12:15 AM

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Albert Brooks and Rob Reiner at the HBO | Max Emmy Nominee Celebration held at NYA East on August 11, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. -

Rob Reiner, who was found dead Dec. 14, had a 60-plus-year friendship with Albert Brooks after meeting in high school

Reiner directed the 2023 documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life about the star

Reiner previously told PEOPLE the importance of maintaining friendships: "As you get older, you need them more than you ever thought"

As evidenced by the outpouring of love and tributes for filmmaker Rob Reiner, who was found dead with his wife on Dec. 14, he had plenty of friends in both the industry and in life.

Perhaps no one was closer than his best friend of 62 years, Albert Brooks, who, along with Billy Crystal and Larry David, formed a close crew.

Brooks, 78, and Reiner had been close friends for six decades, having first met during a drama class at Beverly Hills High School in 1964. They bonded over their shared love of comedy, performing and having famous fathers.

Reiner's dad was, of course, Carl Reiner, the writer and comedian who created and starred in The Dick Van Dyke Show. Brooks' dad was Harry Einstein, a famous radio comic.

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Albert Brooks and Rob Reiner, director during "Alex and Emma" - World Premiere, Hollywood - Red Carpet at Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California, United States.

As the two became friends as teenagers, even Carl approved of his son's friend. In 1963, during an appearance on The Tonight Show, Carl told host Johnny Carson, "The funniest person I know is a 16-year-old kid named Albert Einstein," Reiner recalled on CBS Mornings in 2023. (Brooks' birth name was Einstein, and he changed it for obvious reasons.)

Poking fun of Brooks' original last name, Reiner said on the CBS segment, "He can't split the atom, but he can create energy through laughter." Reiner added, "I think he's the funniest man in the world."

Despite Brooks being a screenwriter and actor, and Reiner being a director and actor, the friends only did one movie together, called The Muse. Brooks wrote and directed the film, and Reiner played himself in one scene.

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Actor Albert Brooks during an interview with guest host Rob Reiner on July 11, 1977

"He was nice enough to hire me," Reiner once recalled. "I offered him When Harry Met Sally. He turned me down." Brooks said he turned it down because at the time he was being called "the West Coast Woody Allen," and he was trying to find his own identity and was worried that doing such a New York-centric film would "cement it."

Eventually, Brooks finally agreed to let Reiner make a movie about his life, which he'd been bugging his friend about for ages.

"I've always looked up to you because in my mind nobody could do what you do," Reiner told his pal during the CBS Mornings clip. The resulting film was Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, which was released in 2023.

When asked why it took so long for Brooks to agree to do the documentary, he said it was partially because of his famous role in Finding Nemo, where he played Nemo's dad Marlin.

"There's a lot of young people if they know me at all, know me as a fish," he said. "You just would like to say, 'You know, there's more to it, but you can put yourself on a street corner [touting yourself] because that's mental illness: 'Wait a minute, I'm not just a fish, did you know I did this....' "

Reiner said, "I knew all the things that Albert had done, I knew how brilliant he was. I wanted them to know."

At 20, Reiner was partnered as a writer with another up-and-coming comedy player: Steve Martin. The two wrote on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour together. In 1971, he was cast as Archie Bunker's son-in-law, Michael "Meathead" Stivic. He went on to direct classics like Misery, Stand By Me and When Harry Met Sally.

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Rob Reiner and wife Michele Singer Reiner in 2019

In his final PEOPLE interview, Reiner said he counted himself "lucky" to still be in touch with longtime close friends like Brooks and Billy Crystal.

"As you get older, you need them more than you ever thought," he said of friends. "I'm lucky that I have people that I can hang out with that, as [Christopher Guest] used to say in the old days, you can schnadel with a little bit, that you can do schtick with."

on People

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