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Estelle Reiner, 94, Comedy Matriarch, Is Dead

Published: October 29, 2008

Estelle Reiner, who as the wife of Carl Reiner and the mother of Rob Reiner was the matriarch of one of the leading families in American comedy, and who delivered one of the most memorably funny lines in movie history herself, died on Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 94.

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Stephen J. Boitano/Associated Press

Estelle Reiner in 2000.

She died of natural causes, said Rob Reiner, who was responsible for his mother’s moment of widest fame.

That occurred in the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally,” when Mr. Reiner, as director, cast his mother as a customer in a New York delicatessen. In the scene, she watched as a woman at a nearby table, played by Meg Ryan, faked a very public (and very persuasive) orgasm. After Ms. Ryan subsided, a waitress approached Mrs. Reiner for her order.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” Mrs. Reiner said.

The American Film Institute made that line No. 33 on its list of the Top 100 quotations from movies, just ahead of Lauren Bacall’s seductive invitation to Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not”: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

His mother’s place on the list, Mr. Reiner said, gives him a thrill.

“I look at it and I see ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!’ I see ‘I coulda been a contender!’ ” Mr. Reiner said. “I see Clark Gable and Marlon Brando. And there’s Estelle Reiner!”

Estelle Lebost was born on June 5, 1914, in the Bronx, where she graduated from James Monroe High School. She was a painter and visual artist early in life (she met her husband while designing sets for shows at hotels in the Catskills), and after turning 60 she became a cabaret singer, recording several CDs and performing regularly as late as 2005. She studied acting with Lee Strasberg and Viola Spolin and had small roles in several other film comedies, including “Fatso” (1980), with Dom DeLuise, and “The Man With Two Brains” (1983), with Steve Martin.

But her deepest influence on American comedy has to do with family, her own and one she inspired. In addition to Rob and Carl Reiner, whom she married in 1943, she is survived by another son, Lucas; a daughter, Annie; and five grandchildren, all of Los Angeles.

Carl Reiner created the 1960s comedy series “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” based on his experience writing for Sid Caesar, a volatile and demanding star. Carl Reiner played the Caesar character, named Alan Brady; Mr. Van Dyke was Mr. Reiner’s alter ego, Brady’s head writer, Rob Petrie, who was married to Laura, a pre-Mary Richards Mary Tyler Moore. The Petries lived in New Rochelle, N.Y., the home of the Reiners, on Bonnie Meadow Road, the same street as the Reiners.

“Basically he wrote his own life,” Rob Reiner said of his father.

So that would mean Mary Tyler Moore was ... ?

“My mother was Mary Tyler Moore, yes,” Mr. Reiner said.

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