General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

All of Me (1984 film)

All of Me is a 1984 American fantasy comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in which the soul of a dying millionaire, Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin), is meant to be transferred into the young Terry Hoskins (Victoria Tennant) but instead enters the body of her lawyer Roger Cobb (Steve Martin), where she controls his right side while he keeps the left¹^•². The film opened on 21 September 1984, runs 93 minutes, and is rated PG¹.

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Carl Reiner; produced by Stephen Friedman for Kings Road Productions¹
Writers	Phil Alden Robinson, Henry Olek, and Edwin Davis (story based on Davis's unpublished novel Me Two)¹
Cast	Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Victoria Tennant, Madolyn Smith, Richard Libertini³
Release	21 September 1984; 93 minutes; PG; distributed by Universal Pictures¹^•⁴
Box office	$5,803,848 opening weekend; $36,403,064 domestic total⁴
Critical reception	85% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (41 reviews); Metascore 68²^•⁵
Awards	Steve Martin won Best Actor from the New York Film Critics Circle (1984) and the National Society of Film Critics (1985); both leads received Golden Globe nominations⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Roger Cobb is a 38-year-old Los Angeles attorney at the firm of Burton Schuyler who would rather play guitar with a jazz band, and who hopes to make partner, partly through his relationship with Schuyler's daughter Peggy (Madolyn Smith)⁷^•⁸. On the morning of his thirty-eighth birthday he suggests to Peggy that they marry⁸.

The dying millionaire Edwina Cutwater, a client of the firm, has arranged with the mystic Prahka Lasa (Richard Libertini) to have her soul transferred at the moment of her death into a brass vessel and then into the body of the willing Terry Hoskins⁹. The ceremony goes wrong: the vessel falls from a window ledge and strikes Roger on the head just after Edwina dies, and her soul takes up residence in his body, controlling the right side while he retains the left¹⁰. When Roger looks in a mirror he sees Lily Tomlin's Edwina rather than his own reflection¹¹. The two spend the rest of the film as a bickering pair sharing one body, seeking the swami and the vessel to undo the transfer, while Roger's engagement to Peggy collapses¹⁰^•³. Eventually Roger falls in love with Terry, the woman Edwina had meant to inhabit¹².

Production

Principal photography began on 22 August 1983 in Los Angeles, with locations including 650 S. Spring Street, used as the exterior of the Schuyler & Mifflin Law Offices, and the downtown Music Center¹. The film was shot in color with Panavision lenses and cameras⁸.

Literary source. A 12 October 1984 New York Times article reported that the film was based on Ed Davis's unpublished novel Me Two, in which a 99-year-old dowager named Cynthia Cutwater passes into the body of an aging derelict after her death. Davis's agent had imagined Katharine Hepburn and Lee Marvin in the roles, but beyond the premise the screenplay bears little resemblance to the novel; Davis used the pseudonym Edwina Davis for the manuscript, and the character became Edwina Cutwater in the film¹. Trade press in September 1983 referred to the project by the working titles Me, Two and Me, Too before it settled on All of Me¹.

Reiner and Martin. The film was the fourth collaboration between director Carl Reiner and Steve Martin, following The Jerk, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and The Man with Two Brains¹¹. The title song, "All of Me," written by Seymour Simons and Gerald Marks, is performed in the film by Joe Williams with an arrangement by Billy May⁸.

Reception

The film received a mainly positive critical response¹. Roger Ebert, the longtime Chicago Sun-Times critic and 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, praised its screwball method of applying absolute logic to an absurd premise and placed it "in a class with Ghostbusters"⁹. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it the best American comedy since Tootsie⁵. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 85% Tomatometer from 41 reviews, with a critics consensus crediting Reiner's direction and the timing of its leads; its Metacritic score is 68²^•⁵.

Reviewers noted a structural peculiarity of the premise: Tomlin's character dies early and returns mostly in voiceover or as mirror reflections, so the two stars are rarely in the same frame, leaving Martin to carry extended physical comedy alone¹⁰. The Washington Post's Tom Shales still called the result "a mighty good time," and Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker that Martin and Tomlin "tune in to each other's timing the way lovers do in life, only more so"¹⁰^•⁵.

Awards and box office

Steve Martin won Best Actor awards from both the New York Film Critics Circle in 1984 and the National Society of Film Critics in 1985¹^•⁶. At the 1985 Golden Globes, Martin was nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical, and Tomlin for Best Actress in the same category⁶.

Distributed domestically by Universal Pictures, the film opened on 21 September 1984 with $5,803,848 and earned $36,403,064 in the United States⁴.

Legacy

In a piece published on 6 May 2005, Daily Variety reported that a remake was in development at New Line Cinema, with a script by Brent Goldberg and David Wagner and Wanda Sykes set to star¹. The film has since been grouped with the body-swap comedies it helped define; Rotten Tomatoes' retrospective ranking of 1984 films places it among the year's best, and its critics consensus calls it "a body-swap comedy worth holding onto"¹³^•².

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026