“I think I was always a director without knowing it,” he says. “When you’re young and you want to get up and perform someplace, you’re making jokes for your friends and you’re really directing yourself. In the Army, I’d write sketches and then instruct people how it should be done. There was a director’s gene in me, so when I did become a director it seemed very natural.”

To Guild members, Reiner is also the frequent and beloved host of the DGA Awards, which he will again handle this year in his 20th year as master of ceremonies. This time, however, Reiner will have the added distinction of being named a DGA Honorary Life Member. “It’s a thrill,” Reiner says of being made an Honorary Life Member. “It’s something I truly did not expect–but I’ll take it!” He also finds it a bit humbling in light of today’s spectacular special effects-driven features. “I have no idea how those young directors do those wondrous things. Truth is, when I was hired to direct my first film, I felt like a bit of a fraud. I was really an actor who acted like a director. With the invaluable help of my assistant director and cinematographer pointing me in the right direction, I was a skillful enough actor to make the cast feel I was a real director.”

Reiner’s comedic mastery has never been in doubt. He enlivens and enriches the DGA Awards year after year, displaying a natural gift to amuse a large, live audience. He makes it look easy but admits there are some nerves because he comes in with no prepared material, and waits for inspiration to strike during the dinner. “I trust that during my intros something funny will come out of me because I do have a curve in my brain that doesn’t allow me to go absolutely straight–but in the back of my mind I am aware that I am emceeing an elegant awards ceremony and doing it straight is a viable option.”

From his earliest days as a Guild member, Reiner said he’s been grateful for its support and is honored to be invited each year to act as the host of the DGA Awards.

“I learned from my old compatriot on The Dick Van Dyke Show, a little about the workings of this fine organization. I was properly impressed at how he and his fellow members of the DGA negotiating committee operated, and how they secured from the studios and networks one of the best retirement and pension packages extant. To this day, when I look at my accountant’s monthly statement and see the Guild check, I think, ‘Hey, look at what this wonderful DGA did for us members. It’s very heartening.”

Born in the Bronx, the son of a watchmaker, Reiner started his working life before he was seventeen as a machinist’s helper in the millinery trade. At the same time, he also enrolled in drama school and after two years at the Rochester Summer Theater, a season touring in a Shakespearean repertory company, singing second tenor in the chorus of an updated version of The Merry Widow, before being drafted into the Army. In World War II, he served various duties: Radio operator in the Air Force, teletype operator in the Signal Corps, studying to be a French interpreter at Georgetown University’s School for Foreign Service, and finally as a comedian and actor with Maurice Evans’ Special Services Entertainment Unit. In the latter capacity, he toured the Pacific Theater for 18 months in G.I. revues. He was honorably discharged in 1946. Reiner then appeared in the leading role in the national and New York companies of Call Me Mister and spent the next three years in various Broadway musicals. He then joined Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows. In 1958 he published his first novel, Enter Laughing, a semi- autobiographical work chronicling his early frustrations as a machinist's helper who broke into show business. The book was adapted for a Broadway play by Joe Stein, and for a feature film that Reiner co-produced and, for the first time, directed.

“A lot of people have said, ‘What I really want to do is direct.’ but I never said that, but I must have thought it.”

Reiner believes his knack for directing developed naturally from his early work in theater and later the Army, when he would instruct people how he would like them to perform in the sketches he had written. The same impulse was there as he was creating The Dick Van Dyke Show. “It was our beloved Sheldon Leonard (the DGA’s longest serving Secretary-Treasurer) who once told me that when I wrote the original scripts for The Dick Van Dyke Show, I, without being aware, had put in very specific directions for the actors and the directors to use as a guide.”

The Dick Van Dyke Show went on the air in 1961 and became one of the most famous and best loved sitcoms in television history, and gave Reiner a chance to co-star as the toupee-wearing producer Alan Brady. That same year, he wrote his first feature film, The Thrill of it All. His other feature credits as a director include The Comic; The Man With Two Brains; Summer Rental; The One and Only; Summer School; Bert Rigby, You’re A Fool; Sibling Rivalry; Fatal Instinct; and That Old Feeling.

As an actor, Reiner has had feature roles on the television series The Bernie Mac Show, Crossing Jordan, Life with Bonnie and Boston Legal; and in films such as The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and the upcoming 2007 release Ocean’s Thirteen. He and Mel Brooks have recorded five 2000 Year Old Man albums, and the book and CD, The Two Thousand Year Old Man In the Year 2000. Reiner’s also published the novels All Kinds of Love, and Continue Laughing, the short story collections, How Paul Robeson Saved My Life and My Anecdotal Life, the children's book, Tell Me a Scary Story, But Not Too Scary, and a new novel, NNNNN, in 2006.