Rex Reed Thos Robinson/Getty Images Rex Reed, the film critic and author whose pithy reviews and provocative Hollywood interviews established him as a bad boy of entertainment journalism, died Tuesday morning, his rep told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 87.
Reed died at his home in Manhattan after a short illness, according to friend William Kapfer, the rep said. He lived since 1970 in a New York apartment in the Dakota that he bought for $30,000.
The Louisianian penned film reviews and columns for the New York Observer since the newspaper’s start in 1987 (he was laid off for a spell in 2017 before being rehired), and his final review was for the film Truth & Treason in November.
Earlier, he spent 13 years as an arts critic for the New York Daily News and five with the New York Post.
Reed was not the typical dowdy or frumpy critic. With his nasally drawl and fashionable attire, he was front and center in a profession where most writers of his time were behind-the-scenes personalities who shied from public exposure. His hauteur could be endearing or off-putting.
Some considered him to be representative of “New Journalism” — his 1966 piece about an angry Ava Gardner for Esquire made it into Tom Wolfe’s noteworthy 1973 anthology — while others decried him as being a celebrity monger. (He was a judge on The Gong Show in the 1970s, after all.)
Indicative of his flamboyant persona, Reed portrayed Myron, who becomes Myra (Raquel Welch) after undergoing a sex-change operation in a dream sequence, in Myra Breckinridge (1970), adapted from Gore Vidal’s salacious novel. His involvement, however, did not stop him from giving the film a negative review.
He also appeared on the big screen in Jules Dassin’s The Rehearsal (1974), as himself in Superman (1978), with Laurence Olivier in Inchon (1981) and with Ryan O’Neal and Shelley Long in Irreconcilable Differences (1984).
In 1986, Reed and former Entertainment Tonight reporter Bill Harris assumed the aisle seats occupied by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on the syndicated At the Movies program after the original pair had left for a similar Disney-produced show.
A notorious name-dropper and gossip — he was a regular on The Dick Cavett Show and The Tonight Show in the 1970s — Reed delighted in interviewing and profiling actresses, especially Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Angela Lansbury and Melina Mercouri.
“The old broads are the ones that interest me the most,” he once told Newsweek. “Nothing bores me more than these mini-skirted girls with nothing on their minds.”
(After Gardner complained about the piece he wrote about her, Reed responded: “Every word of it is true, and it was written in as flattering a way as it is possible to write something when the subject will not let you ask questions, take notes or give any semblance of a dignified interview. Also, she was completely drunk.”)
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Although Reed was never accused of being a populist, he excoriated filmmakers whom he perceived as overpraised or wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes. He was no fan of David Lynch, for example. Blue Velvet, he wrote, was “one of the sickest films ever made. It should score high with the kind of sickos who like to smell dirty socks and pull the wings off butterflies, but there’s nothing here for sane audiences.”
More recently, he endured criticism for how he described Melissa McCarthy, Renée Zellweger and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in his reviews.
He also stirred controversy about the 1993 Oscars when he claimed that presenter Jack Palance mistakenly had called out the wrong person for best supporting actress, naming My Cousin Vinny‘s Marisa Tomei. Reed was vilified, but he stuck to his story, espousing a “massive cover-up” as late as 1997.
Rex Taylor Reed was born on Oct. 2, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas. His father, Jimmy, worked on oil rigs in and around the Gulf of Mexico, and the family moved around a lot.
At Louisiana State University, Reed was editor of the literary magazine and a columnist, critic and editorial writer for the campus newspaper. He also won a national short-story contest as a senior before graduating in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
Distraught by life in the South, Reed figured that the only way to escape his parochial childhood was to write his way out. He applied for a writing job at The New York Times but was only offered a position as copy boy, which he turned down.
So, he supported his intermittent writing sales by performing as a jazz singer on a local TV show, working as a pancake-house cook, selling records at Bloomingdale’s and acting in summer stock in Butte, Montana.
He moved to New York and got a publicity gig at 20th Century Fox but was laid off in a round of budget cutbacks he said was related to the Cleopatra debacle.
In Europe with friends, Reed finagled his way into the Venice Film Festival in 1965 and interviewed Buster Keaton and Jean-Paul Belmondo. He got $125 from the Times for a Keaton article and $150 from the Herald Tribune for a Belmondo story, igniting his career.
Reed was the author of eight books; the first four, collections of profiles, were 1968’s Do You Sleep in the Nude?, 1969’s Conversations in the Raw, 1974’s People Are Crazy Here and 1977’s Valentines & Vitriol. Of the first, Nora Ephron said, “It is impossible to read this book without wondering how on Earth Reed gets his subjects to say the things they do.”
Reed also was a novelist whose first effort, 1986’s Personal Effects, was optioned for a NBC miniseries. And as a devotee of Broadway musicals, he wrote liner notes for such performers as Liza Minnelli, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Mel Tormé and Barbara Cook.
In 1993, he was inducted (along with James Carville and Supreme Court Judge John Minor Wisdom) into the Louisiana Hall of Fame.
Reed never married. “I don’t have ‘relationships,’ except friends,” he told the Times in 2018. “I don’t know, love is not something that I’ve been really good at. I think people are intimidated by people with opinions.”
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