Christopher Reeve

Christopher D'Olier Reeve, born in New York City on September 25, 1952, was an American actor, director, author, and activist whose career spanned 34 years across stage, film, and television. He died on October 10, 2004, from cardiac arrest at a hospital near his home in Westchester County, New York.

Reeve was the son of Barbara Pitney Lamb, an associate editor of Town Topics, and Franklin D'Olier Reeve, a teacher, novelist, poet, and scholar. After his parents divorced in 1956, his mother relocated with Reeve and his younger brother Benjamin to Princeton, New Jersey, where the brothers attended Nassau Street School and later Princeton Day School. Among his notable ancestors was Mahlon Pitney, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1913 to 1922, and Franklin D'Olier, who served as CEO of the Prudential Insurance Company for over 25 years. His grand-uncle Franklin D'Olier Jr. was married to Margaret Winifred Lee, the maternal aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Reeve first discovered acting at age nine in 1962, when he was cast in an amateur production of the operetta The Yeomen of the Guard. His commitment to the craft deepened at age 15 when he spent a summer as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. After graduating from Princeton Day School in June 1970, he chose Cornell University over several other institutions to which he had been accepted, including Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon. At Cornell he performed in productions including Waiting for Godot, Life Is a Dream, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and The Winter's Tale. During his first year, agent Stark Hesseltine, who had previously discovered Robert Redford and represented actors including Richard Chamberlain, Michael Douglas, and Susan Sarandon, contacted Reeve after seeing him in A Month in the Country and offered to represent him. Through Hesseltine, Reeve toured in Forty Carats with Eleanor Parker and received a full summer contract with the San Diego Shakespeare Festival, where he played Edward IV in Richard III, Fenton in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Dumaine in Love's Labour's Lost at the Old Globe Theatre.

Reeve later arranged for his first year at the Juilliard School to count as his senior year at Cornell, convincing the theater director and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences that the training would serve him better than completing Cornell's remaining general education requirements. At Juilliard, where approximately 2,000 students had auditioned for 20 places in the 1973 freshman class, Reeve and Robin Williams were the only two students selected for the Advanced Program. The two shared several classes together and developed a close friendship, with Williams later naming Reeve as a godfather to one of his children.

Reeve made his Broadway debut in 1976, the same year he began what the verified database records as a Broadway career lasting through 1985. His Broadway credits include A Matter of Gravity, The Marriage of Figaro, and Fifth of July. He also appeared in The Aspern Papers in London's West End.

His screen breakthrough came with the title role in Superman in 1978, a part he reprised in three sequels released between 1980 and 1987. Rather than pursuing further big-budget productions, Reeve concentrated on independent films and roles with greater dramatic complexity. His film credits include Somewhere in Time (1980), Deathtrap (1982), The Bostonians (1984), Street Smart (1987), and The Remains of the Day (1993). Over the course of his career he received a British Academy Film Award, an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He later directed the television film In the Gloaming (1997), starred in a television remake of Rear Window (1998), and made two appearances in the television series Smallville in 2003.

Beginning in the 1980s, Reeve was active in advocacy for environmental and human-rights causes and for artistic freedom of expression. In May 1995, he was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia, and sustained a spinal injury that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He used a wheelchair and ventilator for the remainder of his life. Following the accident, he directed his advocacy toward spinal injury research, including human embryonic stem cell research, and toward improved insurance coverage for people with disabilities. He led the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and co-founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center. He also authored two autobiographical books: Still Me, published in 1998, and Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life, published in 2002.