Rex Reed, one of the most widely known, influential and biting film critics of the new wave ushered into prominence by Pauline Kael in the 1960s, died today, May 12, at his home in Manhattan following a short illness. He was 87.

His death was confirmed by longtime friend William Kapfer, who noted that Reed died “surrounded by his closest loved ones.”

Reed, whose stylishly written film reviews, celebrity profiles and interviews with Hollywood and Broadway stars were featured in such publications as The New York Times, GQ, Esquire, Vogue and, most recently, the New York Observer, was a ubiquitous presence on talk shows throughout the 1960s and ’70s, prized by hosts like Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett for his wit and candor.

In a telling sample of his quotes collected for his obituary in The New York Times, Reed could be both worshipful and scathing. In 1968 he said the aging Bette Davis was exciting enough “to make the latest youth idols about as interesting as a withered logarithm.” Broadway’s Gwen Verdon was one of those performers “rare as blue butterflies, who carry around their own lightning.”

Not all of his subjects got off so easy. “If there is anything more excruciating than sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni film, it’s sitting through a Michelangelo Antonioni interview,” he wrote in 1967. He called Peter Lawford a Rat Pack “court jester” with limited intelligence, and drew the ire of Frank Sinatra when he said daughter Nancy Sinatra looked like a “pizza waitress.” After he wrote that a drunk Ava Gardner quipped about Sinatra’s marriage to Mia Farrow, “Hah! I always knew Frank would end up in bed with a boy,” Gardner called “a son of a bitch is either at your feet or at your throat.”

Reed’s writings were collected in numerous books, including his notoriously titled first, Do You Sleep in the Nude?, the question an example of the kind of query he designed to provoke noteworthy responses from his interview subjects.

Even in the latter part of his career, at the weekly newspaper New York Observer, his writings lost none of their sting, and indeed often seemed like an unappetizing leftover from an era when sour personal swipes were more tolerated. He ascribed the Oscar win by deaf Children of a Lesser God actor Marlee Matlin to a “pity vote” and described Melissa McCarthy as “tractor-sized” and a “hippo.”

Reed’s victims relished a chance at payback when the writer tried his hand at acting in the atrocious 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge. He would later appear in better films, but it was Breckinridge – a film that routinely lands of Worst Films Ever lists and was disavowed by Vidal himself – that made headlines. Time magazine wrote at the time that “Myra Breckinridge is about as funny as a child molester. It is an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye.” Both Reed and costar Raquel Welch were pilloried for their performance as the same character before and after what would now be called gender-affirming surgery.

In keeping with his own standards, Reed, too, panned Myra Breckinridge. It was, he wrote, “a train wreck.”