Christopher Reeve
From Philosopedia
Reeve, Christopher (25 Sep 1952 - 10 October 2004)
Reeve is the New York City-born actor known for playing the title role in the 1978 film, Superman.
At the age of four with his mother and brother Benjamin he moved to Princeton, New Jersey, because of the divorce of his parents (journalist Barbara Johnson and writer/professor Franklin Reeve, whose novels were written under the name F. D. Reeve).
He and his brother spent many vacations with their father, whose Sunday dinners included intellectual stimulation by the likes of Robert Frost, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Robert Penn Warren. The boys’ expensive tuition at Princeton Day School was paid for by Reeve’s stepfather, Tristam Johnson. Christopher headed the school's drama club and was student director of its glee club.
When fifteen, he got a summer apprenticeship at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, and a year later he had an agent. After high school and before college, Reeve toured the country as Celeste Holm's leading man in The Irregular Verb to Love.
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The College Years
At Cornell University, majoring in Music Theory and English, he found time to act in France and in England, where at the Old Vic he worked as a “dogsbody”:
- I was a glorified errand boy, but it was a very exciting time there. I helped by teaching the British actors to speak with an American accent. Then I went to Paris to work with the Comédie Française.
By the time he has finished college, he had performed at the Boothbay (Maine) Playhouse, the Williamstown Theatre (Massachusetts), the San Diego Shakespeare Festival, and the Loeb Drama Center. His roles included Victor in Private Lives, Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida, and Macheath in Threepenny Opera. One of two accepted for advanced standing at Ju School of Performing Arts in New York City (Robin Williams was the other), he studied under John Houseman.
The Professional Actor
When Reeve’s stepfather found it difficult to pay for his education, Christopher took the role of Ben Harper in a television dramatic serial, Love of Life, then won a 1976 role playing in A Matter of Gravity with Katharine Hepburn, whom he called “one of the masters of the craft.” He became too busy, however, to finish his final year at Juilliard, moving to Los Angeles to be in Gray Lady Down, then returning to off-Broadway to be in My Life. When he took a screen test for Superman, he portrayed Superman as a hero with brains and a heart,
- somebody that, you know, you can invite home for dinner . . . someone you could introduce your parents to. . . . What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that's how I approached the part.
Marriages
During the eighteen months of shooting Superman, mostly in England, he met and began a relationship with modeling executive Gae Exton, and they became parents to Matthew and Alexandra, keeping joint custody of the two children after parting, unmarried. Reeve then met Dana Morosini, a cabaret performer, whom he married in 1992, and they had a son, Will. He then was in Somewhere in Time, Superman II, the Broadway production of Fifth Of July, seventeen feature films, a dozen television movies, and as many as 150 plays, in some of which roles he played characters that were gay, sociopathic, or villainous
The Crusader
A born crusader, he has assisted numbers of charities and causes relating to the arts, environment, children, and human rights. In 1987, he faced tear gas and real personal danger when Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman asked him to travel to Chile and lead a demonstration in support of seventy-seven artists targeted with death warrants by the Pinochet government. For his successful efforts to free the artists, Reeve received a special Obie Award in 1988 and another award from the Walter Briehl Human Rights Foundation.
He addressed the United Nations to encourage the banning of drift net tuna fishing, and he played a crucial role in securing a landmark agreement to protect the Hudson River and New York City's reservoir system.
In his early twenties Reeve earned his pilot's license and twice flew solo across the Atlantic in a small plane. He also flew gliders and is an expert sailor, scuba diver, and skier.
The Accident
By the 1990's, horses had become his passion. He loved the sport called “eventing,” which combined the precision of dressage with the excitement of cross-country and show jumping. In May of 1995, during the cross-country portion of such an event in Culpeper, Virginia, Reeve's thoroughbred, Eastern Express, balked at a rail jump, pitching his rider forward. Reeve's hands were tangled in the horse's bridle and he landed head first, fracturing the uppermost vertebrae in his spine. Reeve was instantly paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe. Delicate surgery stabilized the shattered C1-C2 vertebrae and literally reattached Reeve's head to his spine. He spent six months at Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey, then returned to his home in Bedford, New York, where Dana had begun major renovations to accommodate his needs and those of his electric wheelchair which he operates by sipping or puffing on a straw.
“Ironically, this most self-reliant and active of men was now facing life almost completely immobilized and dependent on others for his most basic needs. In addition, his condition put him at constant risk for related illnesses - pneumonia, infections, blood clots, wounds that do not heal, and a dangerous condition involving blood pressure known as autonomic disreflexia - all of which Reeve would experience in the coming years,” according to Steven Younis, who maintains an unofficial but authoritative Reeve homepage on the Web.
According to Younis, Reeve's advocacy work understandably began to take on a very personal focus. His experiences with his own insurance company and, particularly, the experiences of other patients he had met at Kessler, led him to push for legislation that would raise the limit on catastrophic injury health coverage from $1 million to $10 million. Reeve accepted the positions of Chairman of the American Paralysis Association and Vice Chairman of the National Organization on Disability. In partnership with philanthropist Joan Irvine Smith, he founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center in California and he created the Christopher Reeve Foundation in 1996 to raise research money and provide grants to local agencies that focus on quality of life for the disabled. Reeve used the contacts he had made in Washington during his years of advocacy work to lead the fight to increase funding for spinal cord injury research which, despite recent breakthroughs by scientists, had previously received inadequate financial support. He won a pledge for an additional $10 million for research from President Clinton in 1996. His efforts in both the private and public sectors have met with considerable success both in raising money and awareness of the needs and desires of disabled people. . . .
In the years after his accident, Christopher Reeve gradually regained sensation in parts of his body - notably down the spine, in his left leg, and areas of the left arm. But he remained dependent on a ventilator to breathe and was unable to move any part of his body below the shoulders. His condition had stabilized and in early 1998, after the taping of a television special to benefit his foundation, Reeve's wife, Dana, described him as "very healthy and very busy."
The Author and Speaker
His compelling autobiography, Still Me, was released in April 1998 and quickly hit the bestseller lists. "Writing the book," Reeve said, "was one of the highlights of my life, before and after the accident."
Seven months later, critics praised his talent and courage when Reeve reclaimed his leading-man status by starring in an updated version of Rear Window for ABC. He continued to schedule many speaking engagements and considered several projects to direct in the spring while tirelessly raising money for spinal cord injury research. He looked to the future with characteristic enthusiasm saying: “My spinal cord is ready below the injury. I'm realistically optimistic. I don't plan to spend the rest of my life like this.”
On Religion
In Minneapolis, speaking at the Courage Center to the disabled on 27 October 1996, he was asked, “Do you believe in the Lord?” Reeve responded,
- Even though I don’t personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though he was watching.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that the audience responded with “huge applause for a moment that was typical for its simplicity and candor.”
Cinemania (24 April 1997) had a column by Roger Friedman about where Reeve gets his undaunted courage, and Reeve’s brother Benjamin, a nonpracticing Massachusetts lawyer, replied that it wasn’t from God:
- We’re devout atheists, so that wasn’t it.
On a Larry King telecast in 1998, Reeve was asked about his religious views and responded,
- Well, believe it or not, I think that, y’know, God is not an entity that you find when you go to church and pray to God Almighty, you know, and I always remembered that going to church as a kid, you know, and they talk about the vengeance of His terrible swift sword and His army, I said, "Well, that’s kind of a scary guy." But I think that, while I don’t believe in God per se, I believe in spirituality. And I believe that spirituality actually is automatically within ourselves, but we have to learn how to access it, and what that is, is realizing there is a higher power; there is [King suggested “So it’s not atheism?”] more than just us, there is an inner strength, there is something, y’know, that comes from - I don’t know where exactly it comes from, but it’s - it really is the best that humans can be and perhaps what it is—perhaps really what it is is love.
Asked online (7 May 1998) what he meant when he had once said that it seemed that his spirit and left his body and looked down on it from the corner of the hospital room, Reeve explained,
- I feel strongly that we are not our bodies. In fact, if a person says “my body,” who is the “me” that is being referred to? Clearly, the spirit and body are two different things. And beyond that, I’m still searching for the meaning of it all.
Deaths of Christopher and Dana
On 10 October 2004, Reeve died after suffering cardiac arrest. More than 100 friends and family of Reeve gathered at his Pound Ridge, New York, home for an invite-only private funeral service. On 29 October 2004 hundreds attended a memorial service for him at the Juilliard School in New York City.
Dana Reeve. after an almost year-long battle with lung cancer, died on 6 March 2006. A private service was held for her 10 April 2006 at the New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street in Times Square, New York City.
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