Rex Reed, film critic and occasional actor, dies at 87

Known for his cutting and sometimes offensive criticism, Reed wrote professionally from the mid-1960s nearly up until his death. Ree​​d spent nearly four decades at the New York Observer, and his writing appeared in outlets like The New York Times, New York magazine, GQ, Vogue, and many more. Reed also made his film debut in 1970 with the infamous flop Myra Breckinridge, and appeared in as himself in Superman, The Gong Show, and The Critic over the years. 

Born in Texas in 1938, Reed moved to New York in the 1960s after graduating from Louisiana State University. Initially wanting to be an actor, he ended up working in the publicity department of 20th Century Fox and was laid off when the studio lost money from Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Cleopatra. The loss of the job led him to criticism, and he first got a job as a music critic at the HiFi/Stereo Review. He bounced around a bit between outlets before landing at the Observer in 1987, where he remained for nearly 40 years. 

For his acting, Reed is perhaps remembered for his part in Myra Breckinridge, the infamous 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s comic novel. Despite acting beside names Mae West and Raquel Welch, Reed acquitted himself nicely in the role. “There’s a tragic yearning at the core of Reed’s performance that’s enormously touching,” wrote Nathan Rabin in his My Year Of Flops review in 2007. “Reed’s longing to crawl out of his old skin and slip into something out of a MGM melodrama is the only thing about Myra that rings remotely true.”

As a critic, Reed was a frequently controversial figure, to say the least. In the 20th century, he authored brutal reviews of Frank Sinatra in concert and about Marlee Matlin’s performance in Children Of A Lesser God. After the 1992 Oscars, Reed claimed that Marisa Tomei’s win for My Cousin Vinny was a mistake in the telecast. In the new millennium, Reed was frequently criticized by other critics for either getting details of films wrong (as he did in his review of Cabin In The Woods), not watching the entire movie was was watching (as with V/H/S 2), or either being downright rude or plainly offensive to the art he criticized (as with Melissa McCarthy, Guillermo Del Toro, and the movie Oldboy). Still, Reed seemed overall popular within his industry, with the New York Film Critics Circle honoring him in 2025, and the Observer remembering him very fondly today. Reed was publishing caustic reviews in the Observer until nearly the end, writing in September that the Emma Thompson film Dead Of Winter was “a hackneyed, uninspired dime-a-dozen horror film” and a “waste of a great actor’s talent and intelligence.”