Despite having a massively famous father, Tracy Reiner has preferred living her life out of the spotlight.
Tracy was born in 1946 to Michael Henry and Penny Marshall. Her mother later married famed director Rob Reiner, who officially adopted Tracy and became her main father figure.
In the wake of Rob and his second wife Michele Reiner’s tragic deaths, Tracy has kept quiet, aside from one public statement about the tragedy.
“I came from the greatest family ever,” she told NBC News last month after Rob, 78, and Michele, 70, were fatally stabbed inside their Brentwood home with son Nick, 32 arrested in the double murder.
“I don’t know what to say,” Tracy added. “I’m in shock.”
Marshall was a 19-year-old student at the University of New Mexico when she got pregnant with Tracy. Henry, for his part, was an 18-year-old college football player.
During a 2012 interview with Newsweek, Marshall reflected on her teen pregnancy, including her decision to keep the baby.
“This was 1963 — there were no legal abortions in the U.S., and I wasn’t going to go to Juárez, you know?” she said. “Girls then were going horseback riding to try to end their pregnancies. I didn’t do that. I figured I made my bed, so I’m going to sleep in it. My third choice was moving to Amarillo. I’d never been there, but I was thinking I’d go and have the baby by myself.
“But instead Mickey said, Let’s get married. He was a great guy. We ended up getting married the weekend John F. Kennedy got shot. All that was on the TV during our honeymoon in a motel was the funeral, which set the tone.”
Marshall told the outlet that she and Henry later got divorced and he moved to Colorado where he remarried and had another daughter.
When Tracy was 8, she moved with her mom to California, where Marshall’s older brother, a comedy writer, was working with Rob’s father, Carl Reiner, which is how Marshall and Rob met.
Once Marshall and Rob tied the knot in 1971, Rob began raising Tracy as his own daughter. Tracy even took Rob’s last name.
“Tracy came to stay with us — she said we had more TV channels,” Marshall recalled to Newsweek. “I did have to send her off to college while wearing a Playboy Bunny suit, because it was during the shooting of that episode of ‘Laverne & Shirley.’
“Carrie Fisher was on the show, and said, ‘Work hard and one day you’ll be as successful as your mother!’ And there I was in a bunny suit with a tail, saying, ‘Bye-bye, honey, have a good time!’”
During a 2021 interview with the Hollywood Sentinel, Tracy reflected on her early experiences with Hollywood.
“The times that I would visit here was always a holiday, so it was just a dreamland to me,” she said. “There was a lot more television shows (in L.A.), and my Mom was sort of a junk-food freak and she would get like fritos and sodas for breakfast and I would always go home completely sick, but I thought it was the greatest time here, so when I finally moved here, there was a whole new world here that I was never asked to participate in.
“Like, I didn’t know the personality rules that were going to show up.”
Tracy eventually followed in Rob and Marshall’s footsteps as an actor, with her most notable role being Rockford Peaches left fielder Betty “Spaghetti” Horn in the 1992 film “A League of Their Own.”
She also starred in the films “Pretty Woman,” “Die Hard,” “Big,” “Apollo 13” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” as well as the TV series “Laverne & Shirley.”
In the Hollywood Sentinel interview, Tracy opened up about struggling to keep jobs in Hollywood.
“Once you’re thirty five in this business, you had better have a couple of things you do because it’s not the most supportive industry,” she said.
“It tries to be, but it’s very hard to get a job with a level income. It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop! It’s not like. ‘Oh, I’m famous, and then I’m not famous,’ it’s the point where everyone is searching for work right now, and so to be prepared for that in your field of interest, when you’re young.”
Tracy added, “I couldn’t imagine just acting, there are so many facets you have to know, it’s not just a tight little family any more now, it’s not just six thousand members of The Screen Actors Guild, there is a lot more in the industry itself because all of the technologies division, it’s now a huge corporate industry you know, so we were all sort of prepared to adapt to that change.”
In her personal life, Tracy has a blended family that includes five children.
She told journalist Jeff Pearlman in 2014 that balancing her family and her career has “made me sane.”
“I grew up basically an only child. I have a sister, Heather, from my father Mickey,” she shared. “I love to be silent and alone and having constant chaos opened up a whole new skill set. Twelve years ago I would have laughed and driven away if you said, ‘Guess where you will be in 2014.’ But I am better now at being me and being a parent and an artist then I ever imagined.”
Through Rob, Tracy has three siblings: Nick, Jake, 34, and Romy, 29.
After Nick was charged in his parents’ murder, Jake and Romy put out a public statement and said they are experiencing “unimaginable pain”
“The horrific and devastating loss of our parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, is something that no one should ever experience,” the brother-sister duo added. “They weren’t just our parents; they were our best friends.”
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