How the pain of addiction stalked the Reiner family

The younger son of the beloved film director Rob Reiner has been charged with murdering his parents. Katie Rosseinsky charts the harrowing buildup to a real-life Hollywood tragedy

- Katie Rosseinsky

When the news broke on Sunday night that the legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had been found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home, the response from the couple's Hollywood friends and film fans alike was one of outright horror.

Reiner, the 78-year-old sitcom actor turned director of beloved movies such as The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally, had brought so much happiness to so many cinemagoers that the notion that his and his wife's lives should have come to such a harrowing end seemed near impossible to compute.

But in the hours and days that followed, the tragedy became yet more shocking. On Monday, Los Angeles police confirmed that they had arrested the couple's son, Nick Reiner, on suspicion of murder; and on Tuesday, Los Angeles County district attorney Nathan Hochman announced that the 32-year-old would be charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

Since his teens, Nick had grappled with addiction to heroin and other drugs, his life a sequence of rehab stays, relapse, and periods of sobriety. The family hadn't kept his troubles a secret, by any means: in 2015, Rob directed a movie co-written by his son, inspired by Nick's experiences. But the film – and the “catharsis” that Rob said they experienced while working on it – could only provide closure briefly, and did not mark the end of his struggles.

Beyond the promotional circuit for Being Charlie, little is known about the private life of this scion of Hollywood royalty. But his parents Rob and Michele's love story was the stuff of industry legend. The actor-turned-director, whose father Carl had created The Dick Van Dyke Show and was half of a comedy double act with Mel Brooks, had been divorced for almost a decade when he started working with Nora Ephron on the romcom When Harry Met Sally.