Charles Shyer, the director and Oscar-nominated writer who teamed with then-wife Nancy Meyers on such audience-pleasing, feel-good comedies as Private Benjamin, Irreconcilable Differences, Baby Boom and Father of the Bride, has died. He was 83.
Shyer died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a brief illness, his daughter Hallie Meyers-Shyer, writer and director of the 2017 Reese Witherspoon comedy Home Again, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The son of veteran assistant director Melville Shyer, one of the founders of the DGA, Shyer started out writing for sitcoms like The Odd Couple and The Partridge Family with then-partner Alan Mandel before they broke into the movies with the box office smash Smokey and the Bandit (1977), starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field.
Shyer’s career skyrocketed when he joined forces with Meyers and Harvey Miller to pen the screenplay for Private Benjamin (1980), directed by Howard Zieff and featuring Goldie Hawn in her first big-screen starring role. The comedy, about a naive Jewish American princess who enlists in the U.S. Army after becoming a widow on her wedding night, earned the trio an Oscar nomination for original screenplay. (Bo Goldman won for Melvin and Howard.)
Meyers and Shyer married in 1980 and, for the next two decades, they established themselves as one of the most successful husband-and-wife creative teams in films. Their relationship comedies uncannily tapped into the pulse of popular American culture.
Irreconcilable Differences (1984), which marked Shyer’s big-screen directing debut, poked fun at the country’s hyper-litigious tendencies with a tale of a 9-year-old (Drew Barrymore) who files suit to divorce her parents (Shelley Long, Ryan O’Neal) because of their constant bickering.
Baby Boom (1987), also helmed by Shyer, played off the concept that a woman can have a career and a family too by exploring what happens when a high-powered New York management consultant (Diane Keaton) suddenly finds herself taking care of an infant after the death of a long-lost cousin.
Meyers and Shyer enjoyed their biggest success by poking fun at weddings and the havoc they can bring with Father of the Bride (1991). A spirited remake of the 1950 classic, it starred Steve Martin as a hapless dad who must come to grips with the fact that his little girl (Kimberly Williams) is all grown up and about to marry.
“Steve Martin contacted us. He had seen Baby Boom and really liked it. And there was a script already written that he didn’t love,” Shyer told Alex Ferrari on a 2021 episode of the Indie Film Hustle podcast.
“We loved Steve so much. And he was in New York. I had never seen the original Father of the Bride. I didn’t even know it existed. It wouldn’t be my kind of movie, necessarily. But we said, ‘Yes. Let’s go meet Steve.’ So we got on the airplane, and I hadn’t read the script yet. Right? I just knew I wanted to direct Steve. I read the script. And I wanted to jump out of the airplane.”
But the lure of working with Martin was too good to resist. Knowing they could rewrite the screenplay to play to his comedic strengths, Shyer and Meyers signed on and watched the original, featuring Spencer Tracy as the dad and Elizabeth Taylor as the bride.
“The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film’s most memorable moments have been preserved,” Janet Maslin wrote of Father of the Bride in her review for The New York Times.
Like the original, Father of the Bride gave birth to a sequel. Taking a cue from Father’s Little Dividend (1951), Shyer and Meyers mined laughs from Martin’s George Banks dealing with becoming a grandfather in Father of the Bride Part II (1995).
Between the two movies, the couple contributed to the script of the ensemble comedy Once Upon a Crime… (1992) and mounted a tribute to the screwball comedies of the 1930s with the Julia Roberts-Nick Nolte starrer I Love Trouble (1994).
Meyers and Shyer divorced in 1999. Their last official collaboration was the screenplay for The Parent Trap (1998), featuring Lindsay Lohan in her movie debut. The remake of the 1961 Disney comedy also marked Meyers’ debut as a director. (Shyer, though, told The Hollywood Reporter that Meyers helped him on his 2022 Netflix film, The Noel Diary.)
He also helmed I Love Trouble; directed The Affair of the Necklace (2001), starring Hilary Swank; and co-wrote and directed a 2004 remake of Alfie, featuring Jude Law.
From left: Harvey Miller, Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, screenwriters on 1980’s Private Benjamin.
Warner Brothers / courtesy Everett Collection
Charles Richard Shyer was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 11, 1941, to Lois and Melville Shyer. A jack-of-all-trades, his dad learned from the likes of D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, served as head of production for Chesterfield Pictures and was a founding member of Progressive Pictures, one of the first independent film companies.
During his 50-plus years in Hollywood, the elder Shyer also directed a handful of films, including The Murder in the Museum (1934) and Mad Youth (1939), and played a key role in establishing the DGA in 1936.
His son, after graduating from UCLA, was one of the first people to enter the DGA apprentice program.
“I used to go onto the set with him when I was a kid all the time,” Shyer recalled. “I was kind of a natural. If he’d been a dry cleaner, I probably would have gone into the dry cleaning business. But I went into the movie business.”
The opportunity led to Shyer’s first professional gigs — assisting on the Norman Jewison-directed The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966) and the NBC sitcom The Mothers-in-Law, created by Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Davis.
Shyer planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and direct. This was put on hold when, in his early twenties, he landed a job as an assistant to screenwriters Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson.
“That kind of sprung me into a whole trajectory of writing,” Shyer said. “I was Marshall’s assistant on the [1966-67 NBC] show called Hey, Landlord. My job was basically do their Christmas shopping, get their cars washed, shit like that.”
When he wasn’t running errands, Shyer offered up jokes and story ideas in story meetings, and Marshall encouraged him to write. Shyer then spent the first half of the 1970s penning scripts for sitcoms including Barefoot in the Park, The Partridge Family, The Odd Couple — he would serve for several years as head writer on that — and Happy Days.
Shyer, though, wanted to work in films. A spec script he had written with Mandel caught the attention of Universal, and they were asked to do a rewrite of the road comedy Smokey and the Bandit, directed by Hal Needham.
“I’m a guy from Studio City. I never heard of an 18-wheeler radio. I mean, I didn’t know what that was,” Shyer said. “But it was a chance. Burt Reynolds was a big movie star.”
Smokey and the Bandit would become a monster hit, finishing fourth on the list of the top domestic-grossing films of 1977. (Star Wars was No. 1.)
Shyer and Mandel were brought on to rewrite two 1978 features — the Walter Matthau-Glenda Jackson romantic comedy House Calls and Goin’ South, the Western directed by and starring Jack Nicholson.
Private Benjamin marked Meyers’ first credit; she had based it on her own experience of backing out of her wedding and reinventing herself as a screenwriter. Shyer, Meyers and Miller shared producing duties with Hawn.
Miller had worked with Shyer on The Odd Couple and The Mothers-in-Law, and it was through him that Shyer first met Meyers. She was out on a date in 1976 when Shyer caught her eye. “Charles was this cute guy wearing a B’nai B’rith T-shirt,” Meyers told the Jewish Journal in 2003.
“Nancy and I just laughed at the same things. We love the same movies, we kind of educate each other on the movies that each of us loved,” Shyer said. “And Nancy really made me laugh. I think she wrote the best one-liners of anybody I know, except Neil Simon. And, and we were just always in sync — as filmmakers, we had this thing.”
Shyer and Meyers also were credited as creators and executive producers on the 1988-89 NBC adaptation of Baby Boom, starring Kate Jackson.
In 2011, Shyer joined forces with jewelry designer Liv Ballard for the online short Ieri oggi domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow). Written and directed by Shyer, the highly stylized piece featuring Ballard’s designs won awards and praise throughout the online and advertising communities.
The Shyer tradition of filmmaking has extended to the next generation with Hallie.
Survivors also include daughter Annie Meyers-Shyer and Jacob and Sophia, twins from his 2004-10 third marriage to Deborah Lynn Shyer. Shyer was also married to actress Diana Ewing from 1969-74.
In his podcast interview, Shyer said comedy was always his thing. “Movies that took place in outer space I wasn’t interested in. I just didn’t dig it at all and still don’t,” he said. “But Billy Wilder movies, I always loved Preston Sturges … those guys, those were the movies I really loved.”
Mike Barnes contributed to this report.
