Carl Reiner knew he wanted to be an actor -- preferably a Shakespearean actor -- from the time he was wearing knee pants. Trained in New York's Works Press on Management Dramatic Workshop, he spent the hostilities years touring with Maurice Evans' G.I. Hamlet, appearing with another young expectant, Howard Morris. After the war he accumulated scores of beasts suite and Broadway credits, then in 1948 made his television inauguration in the short-lived series Fashion Mystery. While starr... ing in NBC's 54th Circle Revue, he was hired as the same of the regulars on Your Show of Shows, appearing on a weekly main ingredient with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and age-old pal Howie Morris. During the scripting sessions for Ostentation of Shows, Reiner became friends with a pompous stick writer named Mel Brooks, with whom he improvised a multitude of free stream-of-consciousness comedy bits which would done crystallize as the classic "2000 Year Old People" routines.

An Emmy conquering hero for his work on the miscellaneous Sid Caesar programs, he entered films as a character actor in 1959. That same year, he wrote, produced, and starred in the cicerone episode for a proposed series close to a comedy journo named Sack Petrie, titled Head of the Family. The network executives liked the concept, but vetoed Reiner as the matchless; swallowing his self-respect, he retooled the property with another leading check, and that's how the Emmy-amiable Dick Van Dyke Show was born. During the series' five-year run, Reiner made innumerable cameo appearances on the program, most memorably as Mug Petrie's mercurial TV-comedian boss Alan Brady.

In 1967 he made his mistiness directorial debut with Enter Laughing, an adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical 1958 unfamiliar (the hard-cover had already been transformed into a Broadway about b dally with Alan Arkin as star). Reiner's later directing assignments included The Comic (1967), a bittersweet farce based on the lives of Stan Laurel, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton; the black comedy cult favorite Where's Poppa? (1970); the peculiar pretence Oh, Genius (1977); and a standard series of Steve Martin vehicles, expanse them The (1978) and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). His haziness output decreased in slew and quality in the l980s and 1990s, granted critics enjoyed his offbeat 1989 working-rank comedy Bert Rigby, You're a Fool and his 1997 Bette Midler starrer That Prehistoric Feeling. In 1995, he earned besides another Emmy award as a remedy for his revival of the Alan Brady character on a memorable episode of TV's Mad About You. Carl Reiner is the forebear of directors Rob Reiner and Lucas Reiner; his wife Estelle has enjoyed a latter-epoch profession as a blackness staff singer and as a cameo performer in her son Rob's films (she's the lady who says, "I'll pull someone's leg what she's having!" in When Harry Met Sally).