Remembering Michele Reiner: Photographer, activist and ‘irate citizen’

By Sandra Gonzalez, CNN

(CNN) — In May 1981, a 26-year-old photographer named Michele Singer took a meeting with Jerry Bowles, then editor of a business magazine in New York.

She had worked her way up from being a photographer’s assistant — a grungy gig that involved a lot of carrying heavy equipment and running errands — and was looking for more commercial jobs. Her portfolio highlighted her talent in design and composition, and impressed him.

Having been educated at a bilingual French school on the Upper East Side, she spoke the language fluently, as well as Spanish, which she had learned on her own. Though she’d skipped college, she was well-read. And she was generous, something that came through when Michele pulled out the portfolio of another photographer during her meeting with Bowles. The person was a friend, and she wanted him to see their work, too.

Bowles had met with hundreds of photographers, and he’d never seen someone do that before.

“She was the first person to be that generous,” Bowles, now 82, told CNN.

But the thing that struck him most, he said, “was she seemed like a young person who had a great sense of who she was and what she wanted to be.”

“I knew somebody this beautiful, this smart, this clever was going to do well.”

An air of wisdom and authority beyond her years made Michele well suited to deal with photo subjects from the corporate world like real estate tycoon Samuel Jayson LeFrak and then-future president Donald Trump, whose portrait she shot for the cover of his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal.

“There was nobody I had ever worked with who did better portraits,” Bowles said, not even “guys who were giants in those days.”

Of course, Michelle Singer, later Reiner, ultimately became a giant herself — a powerful activist, a devoted mother and, with her husband Rob Reiner, part of a Hollywood couple who so much of the country is mourning after their tragic deaths last weekend.

Their son Nick has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Before that tragic night, when a family was plunged into a horrifying nightmare, Michele Reiner built a life based on service, love and devotion to a better world.

Justice, for all

Michele Reiner was, in her husband’s words, “an irate citizen.”

“There’s just too much injustice in the world, and she wants to fix it all,” Rob Reiner said on Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue’s podcast in 2022.

The Hollywood couple’s names often appeared side-by-side in press releases for their efforts in early childhood education, marriage equality, the arts and environmental conservation, to name a few. But Rob Reiner wanted everyone to know that Michele Reiner, his wife of more than three decades, was the driving force.

“She basically stands behind me and kicks me in the ass all the time — ‘Why don’t you do something? You’re a celebrity. You can talk! Get out there and do something,’” the celebrated director said, earning laughs while accepting a Lifetime Achievement award in 2011 from GLSEN, an LGBTQ nonprofit. “So, I listen to what she says.”

Michele Reiner stood next to him, smiling, until he told the crowd she was “petrified” to be on stage because “this is not what she does.” That earned him an eye roll. Hers were famous, according to Kris Perry, a former executive director of First 5, an early childhood education program made possible by the Reiners’ support of a proposition that created a cigarette tax to fund support for families with children ages 0-5.

“You could just see behind the scenes that she very much had an idea of what they should be doing and very much was encouraging him — or pushing him — to go a little further, do a little bit more,” said Perry. “And at the same time, she had her own point of view. She had her own passions.”

Perry knew Rob Reiner for years before he finally met Michele, and remembers leaving their first meeting thinking, “‘Oh, wow, he’s very lucky.’”

Perry later became one of the lead plaintiffs in the case that got Prop. 8, California’s proposed ban on marriage equality, overturned. The Reiners became deeply involved in the cause, often sitting in the front row during hearings.

“They’d just be on the edge of their seat,” Perry said. “If the other side said something not great, like a completely bigoted comment, she almost couldn’t not make an outward gasp or comment.”

“She would be aghast, like, ‘How could you say something so stupid?’”

The day of the ruling, Michele Reiner waited outside the door with others, a moment captured by legendary D.C. photographer Diana Walker. She has her ear leaned against the door and an almost hopeful smile on her face.

“We all felt so supported and validated by them and helped by them,” Perry said. “What they were able to do to help us become a married couple while our kids were still growing up was profoundly important to them and to us and to so many other couples that were in the same situation.”

Being the good

Michele Reiner’s strength was inherited.

When her mother Nicole Bernheim Silberkleit was 17, she and ten relatives were taken to the Drancy internment camp outside Paris and then, a week later, were loaded into cattle cars to Poland, she recounted in a 2001 news article. Bernheim Silberkleit was the only person in her family to leave Auschwitz alive, her brother and parents among those who died.

“My mother is the most incredible person,” Michele Reiner said in an emotional testimony captured by USC’s Shoah Foundation in 1994. “She’s very strong.”

Michele Reiner and her family traveled to Strasbourg in northeastern France in 2023 to unveil four concrete blocks outside her mother’s family’s last home as part of the Stolpersteine project to commemorate victims of Nazi atrocities.

“It was powerful to have my whole family there to remember this moment,” Michele wrote on Instagram, a somber post amid many photos of her kids — Jake, Nick and Romy.

“As my son Jake said, ‘Her will to live is the reason I’m alive.’”

Michele’s sisters — Suzanne and Martine — were also there.

Suzanne Singer is a rabbi but previously had a career working in public television, into which she channeled her passion for social justice. Martine Singer is the head of a nonprofit that advocates for kids and families in underserved communities. Public service runs in the family’s veins.

Talking about trauma in an interview with CNBC, Martine Singer said, “I know what it does not only to individuals but to future generations.” Her mother’s experience, she said, “impacted our entire family.”

“And it is so important for us to prevent trauma and when there is trauma, to give children and families the resources they need to heal and be resilient,” she added.

Their late mother was proud of her daughters. “They’re very understanding, loving and affectionate,” she said in a clip posted to Instagram by USC. “They all got careers and did well. I think they’re terrific children.”

When Rob met Michele…

How Michele Singer married Rob Reiner is, by their own admission, a great story.

It was the late 1980s and Rob was in pre-production on the seminal rom-com “When Harry Met Sally…”, feeling “down and alone,” he told the Toronto Star in 1989. His marriage to Penny Marshall had ended in 1981 after ten years. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever have a romantic partner again.

But he had his eyes open. One day, he told Barry Sonnenfeld, the film’s director of photography, that he really wanted to meet somebody. “So, right out of the blue, he says, ‘There’s a girl in New York named Michele Singer and you’re going to marry her.’” He asked Sonnenfeld if she smoked and when he replied yes, Rob Reiner said he did not want to meet her. He had not been a fan of the four-pack-a-day habit maintained by his ex-wife, director Penny Marshall (whose daughter Tracy he adopted while the two were married).

Michele Reiner recalled being told of Rob’s feelings about smoking. She was 33 and had had “terrible relationships before that,” she recalled. “Well, fuck it,” she thought at the time. “It wasn’t looking good for me.” Or so she thought.

About three-fourths of the way through production on the film, Rob Reiner spotted “a very attractive woman” standing next to Sonnenfeld’s then-girlfriend. He wormed his way into their lunch on the Upper West Side. Nora Ephron was there. It was his first time meeting Michele.

A solo date soon followed, at Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side. He was sweating and nervous. She ran to the bathroom every 15 minutes because she knew he didn’t like smoking but needed to smoke.

“We get there, we’re seated and the first thing she says is, ‘Look, if this doesn’t work out, I don’t want this to hurt your friendship with Barry.’ And I’m thinking, ‘We haven’t even sat down to drinks yet and it’s already not working out,’” he said.

They ordered drinks — or tried to. “He’s 41 years old and he’s never had a drink in his life and he’s never ordered a drink in a bar,” Michele Reiner recalled. “He didn’t know what to order. “I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ So he orders a Port.”

“I didn’t know!” he replied, recounting the story to Thomas and Donoghue.

After that, it just clicked. They never looked back.

Seven months later, they were married after a ceremony in Hawaii where the witnesses were two strangers, one of them a retired elderly woman who had pulled up on a motorized cart and told Rob Reiner that “The Princess Bride” was “a delight from start to finish.” He imitated her voice when he told the story on the podcast.

“I said, ‘Do you want to witness a wedding?’” he later recalled.

Rob and Michele eventually moved into a home once owned by Norman Lear and began to build their life together. She started producing and at one point was co-president of Castle Rock Entertainment. They raised their three children, born in a span of about six years.

The Reiners were proud parents.

Michele Reiner’s Instagram page is filled with photos of her children as adults and as kids, many of them perfectly framed, capturing tender moments, sometimes between them and their father. Clearly the work of a professional. She would celebrate their accomplishments and their beauty, inside and out. They were, she wrote once, “the best kids in the world.”

In the days since their passing, Michele’s friends have paid touching tribute to the woman who, as Rita Wilson wrote, was “wry, funny, opinionated but also reasonable and self reflective.”

More often than not, their names are, once again, sitting side-by-side.

Maria Shriver said they were “two deeply talented, kind, fun, loving, good, patriotic people who loved each other deeply.” Billy Crystal and his wife Janice Crystal issued a joint statement along with other close friends that remembered them as people who “devoted a great deal of their lives for the betterment of our fellow citizens.”

Together, they wrote, the Reiners were “a special force” that was “dynamic, unselfish and inspiring.”

“We were their friends, and we will miss them forever.”

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