As a film-maker, Rob Reiner championed humour, civility and intelligence – qualities you suppose would be out of step with the Hollywood of the 1980s where he made his name, and in the 1990s where he scored a series of extraordinary, far-reaching successes. Reiner had a family interest in the workings of on-screen comedy: his father Carl had played a key role on Sid Caesar’s TV shows, which themselves were revolutionary, and helped birth a new generation of screen comics by directing Steve Martin’s film debut The Jerk. Rob had become a household name as Meathead, the liberal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted Archie Bunker in 70s sitcom All in the Family (the equivalent to Mike Rawlins v Warren Mitchell in the British original, Till Death Us Do Part). But it was as a director and producer that he really made his impact felt.

In 1984, Reiner released This Is Spinal Tap, a “mockumentary” about a fictitious heavy metal band from the UK that rewrote the rules on what comedy could do. It sent up rock’n’roll behaviour and codified its cliches (with Reiner himself doing a hilarious parody of Martin Scorsese’s hosting role in The Last Waltz) and gave us zingers that haven’t lost their comedy power more than 30 years on: “The numbers all go to 11”, “it’s such a fine line between stupid, and er … clever.” Its deployment of improvised comedy was revolutionary for a Hollywood feature, and while Reiner wasn’t the first to use the fake-documentary techniques for comedic purposes (that goes back at least to Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run), it hugely popularised the mockumentary style; subsequent efforts include Bob Roberts, Fear of a Black Hat, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. All these owe Tap a huge debt – as well as the microgenre of star Christopher Guest’s improv-mockumentaries: Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. Almost incidentally, Spinal Tap became a sort-of-real band, with tours, record releases and a follow-up feature (Spinal Tap II: The End Continues), in which the presence of music industry titans Paul McCartney and Elton John demonstrated the high regard in which the original was held.

Reiner’s next film, The Sure Thing, was not perhaps as pioneering: a teen movie starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga, it was released a month after John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club in 1985, and somewhat overshadowed by it in public affection. But Reiner followed it up in 1986 with a very different type of teen movie: Stand by Me, adapted from Stephen King’s novella The Body. By no means the first adaptation of King’s work – Carrie had been a huge hit a decade earlier, with The Shining, The Dead Zone and Christine solidifying King’s reputation as “King of Horror” – but it alerted the wider culture to the author’s more literary output. The Body suited Reiner’s more romantic, nostalgic imagination, and Stand By Me became a film as inserted in the popular mindset as Tap, as well as playing a part in the 80s revival of 60s R&B by using the Ben E King song on its soundtrack – pushing it back into the Top 10 and prompting its use in a Levi’s commercial. Stand By Me also showed Reiner had the chops for drama as well as comedy – not for nothing did he name his production company Castle Rock, after the fictitious small town that King invented for much of his work (and itself named after the fort in Lord of the Flies).

Next came Reiner’s third 80s masterwork, The Princess Bride, adapted from William Goldman’s novel; again, it wasn’t the first in the 1980s “storybook” cycle (The NeverEnding Story came out in 1984), but its brilliant melding of teen romance and comedic cliche-puncturing made it another enormously influential film, particularly in its sympathetic and articulate portrayal of its female protagonist Buttercup, played by Robin Wright. Having seemingly perfected the teen romance, Reiner then went on to release in 1989 one of his most triumphant works: When Harry Met Sally, with a script by Nora Ephron. Again, Reiner and Ephron can’t really be said to have invented the modern romcom (arguably Allen got there first with Annie Hall), but they recalibrated it for a new generation – particularly women, for whom the advent of notional workplace equality in the 1980s was beginning to throw up major life-goal dilemmas. With character weight and screen time distributed equally between leads Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan (as well as creating the epochal fake-orgasm sequence), Reiner and Ephron reinvigorated a classic template and made it newly relevant.

Perhaps inevitably, Reiner’s directing career couldn’t quite live up to those four films in bending popular culture its way, though he did summon up one of Tinseltown’s biggest fears – stalkers – for another King adaptation, Misery, and gave us an early sighting of Aaron Sorkin by directing two films from Sorkin scripts: A Few Good Men and The American President. (The latter led directly to Sorkin’s hit TV series The West Wing, though Reiner wasn’t involved.) It was as a producer and studio executive of Castle Rock that he would make an even bigger impact. In 1989, the company produced a little-regarded pilot called The Seinfeld Chronicles, which tested so badly even they thought it was doomed to fail. As history records, Seinfeld became one of the most successful TV shows of all time, notching huge ratings, critical superlatives and ushering in the golden age of TV by showing that the medium could produce sophisticated, grownup entertainment for a mainstream market.

As a producer, Castle Rock reached new heights once again courtesy of King: two non-horror prison movies, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, released in 1994 and 1999 respectively, both became major cult hits, with Shawshank regularly topping audience polls as the greatest film ever made. As befitted Reiner’s status as a liberal activist, Castle Rock also brought John Sayles’ politically inflected work into the mainstream with Lone Star and produced George Clooney’s cover-up thriller Michael Clayton; it also gave Larry David his first post-Seinfeld outing with the feature film Sour Grapes, and underwrote Richard Linklater’s endlessly influential Before series of romcoms featuring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

Reiner’s influence on Hollywood wasn’t about detonations and superpowers, but about ideas and empathy and wit, and was all the more impressive because of it.