I last saw Rex Reed in person exactly four months ago, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, on January 12, 2026. His longtime friend William Kapfer called three days earlier to tell me Rex had been there for several weeks and that from his hospital bed, he couldn’t stop worrying about his editor at the Observer. That was me. I had already planned to fly up from Richmond, where I work remotely, so the timing felt almost fated.
It took nearly an hour to clear security, then another stretch of wrong elevator banks and unhelpful directions before I finally found his room. When I walked in, I had to steady myself. He looked so small, this man who had always been larger than life.
We spoke again by phone a few weeks later. He’d been back to the hospital since my visit—blood transfusions, liver complications, a cascade of problems that began a couple years earlier, when he fell at a gas station and hurt his foot. “I’ll either get better or I’ll die,” he told me, “and I’ll let you know which one.”
Rex Taylor Reed, the legendary film critic whose sharp wit, uncompromising taste and distinctive prose made him one of the most recognizable voices in American cultural journalism for six decades, died in his sleep on May 12, 2026, in New York City. He was 87. His death was confirmed by Kapfer, who remained by Rex’s side until the very end.
In the time I was his editor at Observer—on and off from 2018 until today—he became a close friend, though I suspect he had that effect on more people than anyone realized. The Rex Reed I knew bore little resemblance to the curmudgeon of popular imagination. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he was that, but he was so much else besides.
The Storyteller
What I loved most about Rex was how he told stories. The kind of anecdote that most people deliver flatly, without drama or color, Rex transformed into something unforgettable. He seized every opportunity to capture an audience. He chose his words with precision—never too many, always unmistakably his. He’d transport you into a moment, make you feel exactly what he felt about the absurdities he saw and made you see, too, and leave you looking back on it with laughter as if you’d been there with him.
Rex rarely laughed, but seemed perpetually amused by the world. I laughed constantly in his presence. Mostly, I found myself exclaiming, “What!” or sighing, “Oh, Rex.”
He seldom asked about my life, but he remembered everything I ever told him—and made certain I knew it. Rex had many friends, including many famous ones. That he kept track of what my husband did for work, where we lived, how old my children were, the things I mentioned enjoying—that generosity of attention meant something.
When I came to New York, we’d have lunch at Michael’s in Midtown or Sardi’s in Times Square. He ordered the same thing every time: a Cobb salad, no blue cheese, iced tea. If the kitchen had hot fudge—and he was meticulous about the distinction between hot fudge and chocolate sauce, a point I watched him make more times than I can count, often to the kitchen itself—he’d finish with ice cream. Our last lunch came a few months after his first serious fall. I had never had to walk him to a cab or help him inside until that day. The injuries accumulated so quickly that I lost track.
At the hospital in January, after cataloging the terrible food and the slow response times from the striking nurses, Rex turned his head as far as he could manage and asked how I do it all. Before I could deflect, he pressed on: “How do you do this job with two little children and a husband?”
People don’t typically ask men this question, and, for some women, it’s a sore point. I appreciated that he asked. More than that, I appreciated that he asked in a tone that conveyed the kind of awe I stop myself from indulging. I burst into tears and told him I didn’t know.
That was Rex—always noticing, always remembering, always making you feel like you mattered. Even at the end.
A Southern Boy in the Movies
Rex Taylor Reed was born on October 2, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas, to Jewell Smith Reed and James M. Reed, an oil company supervisor whose work kept the family in constant motion across the South. Rex attended 13 schools before graduation—an itinerant childhood that taught him to find permanence not in places or friendships, but in the movies.
He saw Gone with the Wind at age two. “The things I remember most are what would affect a child,” he told me. “Bonnie dying on the horse. I was hysterical.” Around the same time, he saw Tarzan’s New York Adventure. “There was a terrible storm in that movie, and I kept tugging at my mother: ‘We have to roll up the car windows!’ She said, ‘It’s just a movie.’ But you see how impressionable I was.”
Rex was adopted—something I learned only during that January hospital visit. He had no siblings, though not for lack of opportunity. “I could have had a sister,” he said, with what I sensed was regret. “But I told my parents that if they adopted another child, I’d run away. I meant it. So they didn’t.”
His mother came from a sprawling Oklahoma clan whose second cousins included the Dalton Gang. She indulged her singular son in ways unusual for the time and place. “In the South, people were easily shocked, and many books were forbidden,” Rex recalled. “The library had a restricted section, but my mother would check things out for me. I read From Here to Eternity at 12. She said, ‘If there’s anything you don’t understand, show me, and we’ll discuss it.’ I never needed to. I already understood.”
Rex spoke of his mother with deep admiration. I once heard someone describe the difference between parents who are gardeners—providing what children need and tending them as they grow—and those who are architects, identifying what makes a child distinctive and building on it. Rex’s mother was an architect. She recognized early what made him shine and nurtured it relentlessly.
His father, descended from military men, understood nothing of show business but had the wisdom not to interfere. “He never discouraged me,” Rex said. “That’s the great thing. So many parents fight their children when they discover they’re different or talented, because they want them to live conventional lives. My parents didn’t.”
Once Rex was old enough to attend movies alone, he saw everything. He memorized Barbara Stanwyck’s filmography, which is why, when he finally met her years later in New York, they became genuine friends. “I knew what to ask her,” he explained. “I asked questions that interested her.”
The Rise of a New Kind of Critic
Rex graduated from Louisiana State University in 1960 with a degree in journalism. He had already been writing film and theater reviews for the student paper, The Daily Reveille, and the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate. During college, he interviewed anyone who came South to make a movie—and in those years, many did, shooting on location in the plantation houses of Mississippi and Louisiana.
When Angela Lansbury, Paul Newman, Lee Remick, Joanne Woodward and Orson Welles descended on Baton Rouge to film The Long, Hot Summer, Rex showed up daily to cover it for the school paper. A college girlfriend, Elizabeth Ann Cole, begged to tag along. She caught the acting bug so severely that she dropped out, moved to New York, changed her name to Elizabeth Ashley, and landed on the cover of Life within a year. “We’re old friends,” Rex said simply. “My life has been amazing.”
After graduation, Rex moved to New York, hoping to act. Instead, he found himself in the publicity department at 20th Century Fox, where his duties included entering the steam room “in my starched shirt” to read gossip items aloud to studio chief Spyros Skouras. When Cleopatra‘s cost overruns nearly sank the company, Rex was among the first casualties—”the little guy at the $75 salary, the most dispensable item in the company.”
That firing liberated him. Still in his twenties, he began writing celebrity profiles for The New York Times and New York magazine, pioneering a form of journalism that captured stars as they actually were rather than as studio publicists wished them to appear.
Tom Wolfe observed that “Rex Reed raised the celebrity interview to a new level through his frankness and his eye for social detail. He has been a master at capturing a storyline in the interview situation itself.” Alongside Wolfe, Truman Capote, Kenneth Tynan and Harry Crews, Rex elevated a genre once dismissed as gossip into something approaching literature.
His 1968 collection Do You Sleep in the Nude? captured Barbra Streisand on the cusp of superstardom, Warren Beatty finishing Bonnie and Clyde, Buster Keaton in his final interview, and Ava Gardner in her twilight—a portrait so vivid that it became one of the most reprinted celebrity profiles of its era.
“I took the lowest form of journalism—the celebrity interview—and did something with it,” Rex reflected. “For a boy with no money who didn’t know a famous soul to come to New York and make a name in journalism, that was no small achievement.”
The Dakota and a Life Beyond Imagination
In 1969, Rex fulfilled a fantasy by moving into the Dakota, the legendary apartment building on Central Park West that had acquired an aura of gothic mystique from Rosemary’s Baby. He paid $30,000 for his two-bedroom unit—a sum that now ranks among the most astonishing real estate bargains in Manhattan history.
His first night there, Rex owned only a sleeping bag, a shopping cart filled with books and records, and a wide-ribbed, lemon-yellow corduroy Queen Anne chair. The doorbell rang. He answered in a towel. Standing before him was Robert Ryan, one of the most celebrated actors in Hollywood. “I’m the president of the Dakota board,” Ryan said. “I came to welcome you to the building.” Rex made instant coffee while Ryan settled into the yellow chair. Rex sat on the sleeping bag.
He lived in that apartment for more than 50 years. His neighbors over the decades included Boris Karloff (“I used to find his fan mail in the garbage—a dream come true”) and Lauren Bacall. He also kept an 18th-century country house in Litchfield County, Connecticut, which contained a bathtub painted by Alexander Calder titled Heaven, Earth and Hell, featuring a serpent in red sunglasses.
The same year he moved to the Dakota, Rex made his film debut in Myra Breckinridge, the Gore Vidal adaptation, playing Myron, a character who undergoes a sex change (Raquel Welch played his post-operative self). The film also starred Mae West and Farrah Fawcett. Everyone involved, including Rex, disowned it. His account of the production was characteristically wry: “Mae West spoke to no one but God. Raquel spoke only to the studio head. The studio head spoke only to God, who relayed messages back to Mae West.”
Rick
In our last conversation, about a month ago, I asked Rex very directly about his personal life—something we never discussed but which he danced around for years, making clear the door wasn’t closed but wasn’t quite open. I told him about my husband’s hairstylist, a Gen X gay man named Charley who happens to be the brother of a very famous film director. Charley had mentioned that when he was young, there was no one in entertainment he could look up to as someone who was different—until he saw Rex on television. Rex was the first person who reminded Charley of himself.
Rex was genuinely surprised. “No,” he said. “No, I did not know that anyone looked up to me.”
I asked about partners. Did he ever have one? Years ago, I reminded him, “You said you couldn’t fathom waking each day to the same face.” Was it true? He sighed through the phone and then answered so clearly I wondered if the fog had been an act. Rex monologued, talked in circles, reached for effect. This question had grounded him. He’d only ever had one, he told me, and it lasted 25 years. His name was Rick Winter, and he ran DRG Records, producing albums including Liza Minnelli’s recording of The Act. After Rick died, there was no one else.
“I don’t have much of a private life,” Rex said. “I lose myself in loving what I’m writing about.”
In 2018, he had put it differently: “Love is not something I’ve been good at. People are intimidated by people with opinions. How do you start looking for a wife or boyfriend at this point? It’s too late. Though it would be nice to find someone handy with a wheelchair, because that day is coming.”
Now I understood: Rex wasn’t loveless. He was, in his way, widowed. And he had chosen work as his companion in the years that followed.
The Observer Years
Rex’s byline appeared in virtually every major publication with “New York” in its name—the Times, New York Magazine, the Daily News, the Post—plus GQ, Esquire, Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily. He served on film festival juries in Berlin and Venice. But his nearly four-decade run at Observer became the defining chapter of his career.
Arthur Carter hired him in 1987, four days before Rex turned 49. By then, he had already achieved every honor a cultural journalist could want. He showed no signs of slowing down. That was nearly 40 years ago.
“I don’t know how many years I have now devoted to Observer,” Rex told me in one of our final conversations, “but I really have not written for anybody else in years.”
After breaking his ankle one summer, despite explicit instructions to forget about Observer and focus on recovery, Rex sent near-daily updates on his assignments. He took the work as seriously at 80-something as he had at 49. When he finally acknowledged he couldn’t attend the Toronto Film Festival for the first time in 25 years, the anguish in his message was unmistakable.
“I am still struggling badly with my foot,” he wrote me. “It’s swollen to twice its normal size. I can walk, but I don’t think I can manage two airports, taxis, a hotel, then walking three or four times daily to screenings blocks apart, dragging luggage and press books and notes around Toronto on one foot. I’ve covered that festival for 25 years. I don’t want to miss it. But I know I’m tempting fate. I don’t want to fall and end up in some Canadian hospital.”
In his final weeks, as he described blood transfusions and liver complications, he kept apologizing for not filing copy. I finally told him to stop. “If one more person calls me and says ‘Rex wanted me to tell you he’s sorry he hasn’t written,’ I’m going to scream,” I said. “That’s not what I care about. I care about whether you’re okay.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances.”
He told me I was the best person he’d ever worked with. “And I’ve worked with major, major editors,” he added. (He was on a lot of meds; I’m no Peter Kaplan.)
Notes from Rex
Rex’s emails arrived with one of two subject lines (“a note from Rex” or “from Rex Reed”) and generally covered four topics: reviews he was submitting; explanations of why a particular film was too dreadful to review at all; complaints about the photos I’d chosen (I was, apparently, reliably terrible at this); and elaborately entertaining accounts of his misfortunes, laced with kind words about our collaboration and questions about my children.
“You didn’t run a photo of Maïwenn that shows her prominent buck teeth,” one message read, “so my description of her as Madame du Barry makes no sense. Do you want to change it?”
“The photo of the man in the white suit is Nick Odenkirk, not Dennis Quaid,” read another, “and the photo of Dennis Quaid is unrecognizable. I suppose it is Quaid, but it doesn’t look like him. All of this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say the movie business has gone to the dogs.”
“I just hate that photo,” he wrote of a different piece. “This photo shows no facial features; the person in it is so small he disappears, it makes no impression, and it could be anybody. I am still shocked over the terrible photo we used of George Clooney, and now this one is just as bad. Great photos exist—can’t you find one?”
Some photo debates spanned multiple emails. After I replaced one image, he replied: “The new photo is even worse than the first one. It has peripheral characters I don’t even mention in the review and no reader will know who they are.” I tried again. “That is the worst of the three. I have never seen such a lousy group of photos, and not one shot of Nicholas Hoult in any of them. Just go back to the original. At least it shows Jude Law’s face. Thanks for putting up with me.”
Once, my entire assignment inquiry was met with: “No, I won’t be doing FURIOSA.”
Other times, the explanation was more involved: “I went to see Spain last night, but it was so cold, they had air conditioning on that was blowing cold air on my head, and I was in agony from sitting with three layers of clothes on, so I left after half an hour. What I saw was 30 minutes of total nonsense, and I didn’t understand one word of it, so there will be no review.”
Especially when Rex hated a movie, his evisceration was so colorful that it made me want to see it. That was his gift: he could pan something so viciously that it felt unmissable. I tried explaining this to him a few times—you hate it so much, I have to see it—and he’d grumble, not angry but perplexed, as if my Millennial sensibility was something he’d never crack. In ways, Rex was like a grandparent I got to keep long enough to appreciate.
More than once, I made an edit he couldn’t abide. “You changed it, but now it is worse than ever,” he wrote. “You can’t say—or rather, I can’t say—’lovely, appealing Elliot Page.’ It is ‘lovely, appealing Ellen Page,’ referring to BEFORE the transition. The way it reads now is positively ridiculous—on NYO, on the Drudge Report, and on Rotten Tomatoes. I wish you would just reinstate the copy the way I wrote it, which is how I meant for it to read and makes perfect sense. But no way can you refer to the man Ellen Page is now as ‘lovely, appealing Elliot Page.'”
Technology was a recurring nemesis. “All of this technology is driving me around the bend,” he wrote. “Oh god, the stress of technology never ends for me.” After an automatic update, he cried sabotage: “This is all the fault of Microsoft Word.” Another email opened simply: “Submerged in computer problems.”
His health dispatches arrived with the same theatrical flair he brought to everything else.
“Let me catch you up on my sad little saga. After three weeks as a shut-in with back problems, the pain finally improved. I gathered my notes on the films I needed to review and went to the country to rest and write. No sooner did I arrive than an old crown fell out, leaving a hole in my mouth that immediately began to hurt. I returned early to New York and went to the dentist at nine the next morning. One examination and he said, ‘Everything beneath the crown has decayed so rapidly it didn’t show on X-rays. To save your mouth, it has to come out.'”
He continued: “Horrified—my teeth have always been my best feature—I gave in. The tooth had split in two, requiring two surgeries. There was a cyst on the bone beneath. That had to be removed, then bone grafting. By the time I got a Percocet and antibiotics, I was in the worst agony of my life. I spent the rest of the day in bed on painkillers and warm salt
He signed off: “My face is so swollen I look like Rocky. I can’t move my mouth. I have a black bruise across my jawline that resembles a Dick Tracy villain. I am so sorry, but life isn’t very pleasant right now.”
“I look like something out of a monster movie” became a refrain in his correspondence.
His emails weren’t only about health. After one Thanksgiving spent with friends, he reported: “The girls just can’t cook. I asked for a drumstick, and it was so hard and burned that I could not eat it, so I asked for white meat instead, and it was dried out and completely tasteless. The Brussels sprouts were burned, the cranberry sauce was just that—a sauce with the consistency of
Yet amid his suffering, he thought of others. “How is your daughter?” Rex asked, after a particularly brutal bout with diaper rash that left her home from daycare for days (and delayed the publication of a review). “I am worried about her,” he said. During the 2023 holidays, he wrote: “You sound like you’re having a hectic time lately. I hope you can settle down and have a well-deserved, restful Christmas weekend. Raise a glass to a more pleasant 2024. Working with you has been the best part of 2023, and I hope you know how sincerely I mean that.” A year later: “I guess this is finally the year everyone gives up sending Christmas cards, but I am so glad you sent yours because those two children are adorable. She’s a peach, and he should be in the movies. You must be so proud of them, and I am so happy for you. I know you are planning a great Christmas for them, although with all of your responsibilities, I don’t know how you find the time.”
A Different Eye
When I asked whether anyone had taught him to see the world differently, he answered without hesitation: “It was always inside me. No one taught me anything about movies or jazz or singing. I can’t explain it, but I was always different.”
His tastes were fierce and unapologetic. He loved horror—”the things that terrorize you”—though he lamented that those who knew how to make great horror films were gone. He adored vampires, Dracula, Bela Lugosi. He was fascinated by the Nazis: “The most interesting manifestation of evil in my lifetime.” Westerns held no appeal. “I hate all of them. They had nothing to do with my life.”
He once wrote, “If the movie has alligators, I’m in.” When I asked why, he explained: “Alligators were everywhere in Louisiana—in the swamps, everywhere. They became symbols of terror for me.” Visiting India, he cared less about the Taj Mahal than about the cobras that spat at tourists. “I’ve always been fascinated by things that terrify.”
The only C grade he ever received in college came in feature writing—because he refused to follow rules. The first principle of the Associated Press style was the five W’s in the opening paragraph: who, what, why, when, where. “I hated that,” Rex said. “I started stories with the color of the wallpaper.” His editors loved it. He never wrote on spec.
On Being Misjudged
Rex dreaded being remembered as a curmudgeon, and I understood why. The first question people asked about him was always “Is he really that mean?” followed by “Is he really that angry?” It’s easy to reduce a person that way. It isn’t the full story of Rex.
“I’ve been severely misjudged,” he told me. “People think I’m a monster. They accuse me of things they actually do themselves. They attack me because they don’t like me—not because of my work. I’ve never done that. What I’m negative about is the absence of quality. We’re drowning in mediocrity. I grew up when things weren’t mediocre. Now they are.”
Some of his reviews did spark controversy. His comments about Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief were referenced at the Academy Awards. During our last phone call, Rex brought it up with characteristic self-awareness: “Maybe I’m getting paid back for what I’ve written about Sylvester Stallone.”
I told him what I believed: Everybody thinks what Rex had the courage to say. Few people even admit thinking it, and when someone says it, everyone gets up in arms—because they have to, because it’s just not a thing anyone is supposed to say.
“I’m not judgmental,” he said—a claim that might astonish anyone who’d been on the receiving end of his reviews. To those who knew him personally, it made perfect sense.
Angela
Among Rex’s closest friends was Angela Lansbury. Theirs was not a relationship of fan and star but something more like family.
When Rex first arrived in New York and began writing for the Times, Lansbury was opening in Mame—one of the most anticipated musicals in Broadway history. The paper assigned Rex the story. But his mother was dying of leukemia in Baton Rouge, and he had to leave. The editors considered reassigning the piece. Lansbury refused. “What he’s going through is more important,” she said. “The story can wait.”
After Rex covered the Cannes Film Festival, Lansbury insisted he come stay with her in Ireland. She left keys for him when she wasn’t there. When his father suffered a coronary and no flights were available out of Ireland, she personally called the head of Aer Lingus and got him on a plane to Baton Rouge.
What did they do together? “I taught her card games. We watched old movies. We went to restaurants. We enjoyed the quiet part of life, away from everything. We became very good friends.”
Lansbury’s death in 2022 devastated him. “I don’t feel like I have friends anymore,” Rex said in his final years. “They’re all gone.”
“The End Is Coming Soon”
“I am beginning to see into the crystal ball, you know, and the end is coming soon.” Rex said this to me many times over the years—a lamentation I never wanted to hear but felt privileged to receive. His old-school Manhattan drawl had a sharp, theatrical flair; every word carried an unmistakable lilt of wit and authority. He was a critic who understood he was the star of his own show.
“It’s all going to be over soon,” he’d say, “and I don’t want my last impression to be: Film Critic Found Dead at Computer Reviewing a Bad Movie.”
I cannot think about Rex no longer being on the other end of the line without feeling a lump rise in my throat, threatening to erupt. I knew he was right—that our time was finite, that I would miss every layer of him terribly when he was gone.
During our last phone call, we talked about the Oscars, which Rex had watched and hated. “Everybody tried too hard to appeal to a younger audience,” he said. “Older people who try to appeal to a younger audience but don’t know what younger people like just make a mess out of everything. I thought the jokes were stupid. I thought the acceptance speeches were stupid. They’re not interested in a dignified, distinguished show to award artistry. They’re trying to turn it into a Las Vegas floor show.”
I asked what bothered him most. “Art should not be competitive,” he said. “I don’t think art should be competitive.”
Was there ever a time when good movies outnumbered bad ones? “Yes,” he conceded, “but not while I was writing. I saw wonderful films through the ’60s and maybe a few in the ’70s. But the greatest movies were in the ’40s. It wasn’t a great period for the world, but the movies reflected higher thinking.”
What made a good film? “Real people doing real things, saying real things to each other. That’s what I respond to. Most of what I see now is fantasy, sci-fi, horror, brutality, carnage. Those aren’t the subjects I want to die thinking about.”
How He Wanted to Be Remembered
“I’d like to be remembered as someone who really tried to make things better,” Rex told me. “Or at least respected what was good when it happened. Not as a curmudgeon. That’s not what I am in real life.”
Toward the end, Rex spoke of wanting to work less and experience things he’d never done—a safari, perhaps. “I’m so tired of writing,” he admitted. But the reviews kept coming. He couldn’t help himself.
“I didn’t plan for my life to turn out this way,” he told me in our final conversation. “And I’m not happy about the fact that it’s headed in a terrible direction from what it was. I feel rotten about it, but there’s just nothing I can do but play the cards that are dealt.”
In January 2025, the New York Film Critics Circle honored Rex at their annual dinner for his 50th anniversary with the group. He had outlasted every critic of his generation and the one before. Stars cited him by name in acceptance speeches, recalling his reviews. He was one of a kind.
When I published a profile of Rex in Observer, he wrote back almost immediately: “I hope I did not come off sounding too self-indulgent or too self-pitying. But what you quoted, at great surprising length, was accurate—one of the most accurate portrayals of me ever written—so if anyone objects, at least I can only blame myself.” He wanted to know where I had found the photos, particularly one of him with Angela Lansbury that he had never seen. “I have many photos of us together, but I have never seen that photo and don’t even know where it was taken.” He asked if I could get him a copy.
In the end, Rex got his wish. He was not found dead at a computer reviewing a bad movie. He died in New York—the city he’d dreamed of as a boy in the South—surrounded by memories of everyone he had known and everything he had witnessed in a life that was, by any measure, extraordinary.
Rex is survived by no immediate family. But what he left behind—eight books, thousands of reviews, countless profiles, a body of work that transformed cultural journalism—will endure. And for a generation of young gay men who saw him on television and recognized something of themselves, he was proof that being different could become a life’s greatest asset.
What I will remember are simpler things: the lunches at Michael’s, the Cobb salads without blue cheese, the hot fudge (never chocolate sauce), and a friend who always made me feel like I mattered.
Oh, Rex.
If you have memories of Rex Reed—even if you didn’t know him personally—that you would like to share, please send them to merin@observer.com. I’ll compile and publish later this week. Lots of love, and thanks for making it this far down the page.