Despite having a very famous father, Tracy Reiner preferred to live her life away from the spotlight.
Tracy was born in 1946 to Michael Henry and Penny Marshall. Her mother later married famous film director Rob Reiner, and Reiner officially adopted Tracy and became her primary father.
Following the tragic deaths of Rob and his second wife Michelle Reiner, Tracy has remained silent aside from public statements about the tragedy.
“I come from the best family ever,” she told NBC News last month after Rob, 78, and Michelle, 70, were stabbed to death inside their Brentwood home and her son Nick, 32, was arrested for serial 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 became pregnant with Tracy. Henry was an 18-year-old college football player.
In a 2012 interview with Newsweek magazine, Marshall reflected on her teenage pregnancy, including her decision to keep the baby.
“This was 1963, there was no legal abortion in the United States, and I had no intention of going to Juarez,” she said. “Back then, girls went horseback riding to terminate their pregnancies. I didn’t do that. I made my own bed, so I thought I’d sleep there. My third option was to move to Amarillo. I’d never been there, but I thought I’d go and have the baby on my own.”
“But instead, Mickey said, ‘Let’s get married.’ He was a wonderful guy. We ended up getting married the weekend John F. Kennedy was shot. During our honeymoon in a motel, the only thing that was on TV was the funeral, and that set the tone.”
Marshall told the magazine that she and Henry later divorced and moved to Colorado, where she remarried and had another daughter.
When Tracy was 8 years old, she moved to California with her mother. There, Marshall’s brother, a comedy writer, worked with Rob’s father, Carl Reiner, and that’s how Marshall and Rob met.
When Marshall and Rob married in 1971, Rob began raising Tracy as his own daughter. Tracy took Rob’s last name.
“Tracy came to stay with us and she said we had more TV channels,” Marshall recalled to Newsweek. “We were filming an episode of ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ so I had to send her to college in a Playboy bunny suit.
“Carrie Fisher was on the show and said, ‘If you work hard, you’ll be as successful as your mother one day!'” So I put on a bunny suit with a tail and said, ‘Bye, honey, have fun!’ ” he said. ”
In a 2021 interview with the Hollywood Sentinel, Tracy reflected on her early experiences in Hollywood.
“It was a dreamland for me because it was always my holidays to visit here,” she said. “There were a lot more TV shows[in Los Angeles]. And my mom was like a junk food freak, eating Fritos and soda for breakfast, and I always came home completely sick, but I thought this was the best time, so when I finally moved here, there was a whole new world here that I had never been asked to be a part of.
“Well, I didn’t know the laws of character that were going to emerge.”
Tracy eventually followed in Rob and Marshall’s footsteps as an actor, with her most famous role being as Betty “Spaghetti” Horne, left fielder for the Rockford Peaches, in the 1992 film A League of Their Own.
She also appeared in the films Pretty Woman, Die Hard, Big, Apollo 13, Jumpin’ Jack Flash and the television series Laverne & Shirley.
In an interview with the Hollywood Sentinel, Tracy revealed that she struggles to keep a job in Hollywood.
“When you’re 35 in this industry, you better have some things to do, because it’s not the most supportive industry,” she says.
“I would like to do that, but it’s very difficult to get a job that pays the same. It’s not a fall that kills you, it’s a sudden stop. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m famous, and then I’m not famous.’ This is a time when everyone is looking for a job, so you need to prepare for that while you’re young in your field of interest.”
Tracy added, “I couldn’t imagine just acting. There’s so much to know. Now it’s not just a small family, it’s not just the 6,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild. There’s so much more to the industry itself, because the whole tech sector is now a huge corporate industry. So we were ready to adapt to that change.”
In her personal life, Tracy has a blended family with five children.
She told journalist Jeff Perlman in 2014 that balancing family and career “kept me sane.”
“I basically grew up as an only child. My father, Mickey, and I have a younger sister named Heather,” she said. “I love being quiet and alone, and being constantly confused has opened up a whole new skill set. Twelve years ago, if you’d asked me, ‘Guess where I’ll be in 2014,’ I would have laughed and brushed you off.” But today, I’m a better person, a better parent, and a better artist than I ever imagined. ”
Through Rob, Tracy has three siblings: Nick, Jake (34), and Romy (29).
After Nick was charged with murdering his parents, Jake and Romy released a public statement saying they were experiencing “unimaginable pain”
“The horrifying and devastating loss of our parents, Rob Reiner and Michelle Reiner, is something no one should ever have to experience,” the brother-sister duo added. “They weren’t just our parents, they were our best friends.”
