Rex Reed

Rex Taylor Reed was a force of singular conviction in American arts journalism — a film critic whose caustic wit, elegant prose, and unabashedly contrarian tastes made him one of the most recognized bylines of the twentieth century. Born on October 2, 1938, in Fort Worth, Texas, to Jewell Smith Reed and James M. Reed, an oil company supervisor, Rex spent his childhood in perpetual motion, moving across the American South as his father's work demanded. He attended thirteen schools before graduating from Natchitoches High School in Louisiana in 1956. Lacking permanence in places, he found it in movie theaters — and the love he formed there never left him. He famously remembered being taken to see Gone with the Wind at age two and being hysterical at the scene of Bonnie dying on the horse. Reed enrolled at Louisiana State University in 1956, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism in 1960, while writing film and play reviews for The Daily Reveille and The Morning Advocate. He moved to New York City in the early 1960s, briefly working in the publicity department at 20th Century Fox before budget cuts following the production of Cleopatra pushed him into the career he was always meant for. He began writing for The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, and in the years that followed became one of the most prolific critics in the country, contributing to Vogue, GQ, Women's Wear Daily, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post. From 1987 until his death, Reed served as chief film critic and "Talk of the Town" columnist at The New York Observer — nearly four decades with one publication, a commitment as rare in journalism as his voice was distinctive. He authored eight books, served on juries at the Berlin and Venice International Film Festivals, and was inducted into the Louisiana Hall of Fame in 1993. His was a face and voice as recognizable as the stars he reviewed: the fashionable attire, the Southern drawl, the air of someone perpetually amused by a world that rarely lived up to his standards. Reed never married and had no immediate survivors. He died peacefully in his sleep on May 12, 2026, in his Manhattan home at the age of 87. He leaves behind a body of work — and a standard of conviction — that the world of criticism will not easily replace.