Christopher Reeve

Christopher Reeve: The Man Who Was Superman Twice

When Christopher Reeve first put on the cape in 1978, he faced a peculiar acting problem: how to make an invulnerable alien feel human. His answer was gentleness - a Superman who was shy, courtly, faintly amused by his own power. Seventeen years later, thrown from a horse and paralyzed from the neck down, he confronted a far harder version of the same problem, and answered it the same way: with a stubborn, unglamorous refusal to be broken. The second performance was not on film, and it made him a hero in a sense the first never could.

An Ivy League Actor

Reeve was born on September 25, 1952, in New York City, a descendant of Mayflower pilgrim William Bradford. He graduated from Cornell University in 1974 with a degree in English, then trained at the Juilliard School under John Houseman, where his classmate was Robin Williams. He made his Broadway debut in 1976 opposite Katharine Hepburn - the classical grounding of a serious stage actor, not a matinee idol.

The Role That Defined Him

*Superman* (1978) turned Reeve into a global star and earned him a BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer. Director Richard Donner had demanded verisimilitude - the film's tagline promised audiences would believe a man could fly - and Reeve supplied the emotional truth that made the effects matter. He played the role across four films through 1987, embodying a masculine ideal built on decency and restraint rather than brute force.

Escaping the Cape

Like many actors welded to an icon, Reeve fought to be seen as more. He built a varied resume: the time-travel romance *Somewhere in Time* (1980), the thriller *Deathtrap* (1982), the Merchant-Ivory dramas *The Bostonians* (1984) and the Oscar-nominated *The Remains of the Day* (1993), and *Street Smart* (1987). He was a working actor of range and taste, even if none of these roles rivaled the fame of the one in blue.

May 27, 1995

Reeve had taken up competitive horseback riding in the mid-1980s. On May 27, 1995, at an equestrian event in Culpeper, Virginia, his horse balked at a jump and he was thrown, fracturing his upper spine and severing his connection to his own body from the neck down. He would need a ventilator to breathe. In the depths of that first despair, he later recounted, his wife Dana told him: "You're still you. And I love you." He chose, in his words, to mobilize rather than disintegrate.

A Second, Greater Career

What followed was arguably the most consequential work of his life. Reeve became the world's most visible advocate for spinal cord injury research. He testified before the Senate in support of federally funded embryonic stem cell research, lobbied to help double the National Institutes of Health budget - which grew from roughly twelve billion dollars in 1998 toward twenty-seven billion by 2003 - and championed New York's Spinal Cord Injury Research Bill. As chairman of the foundation that now bears his and Dana's names, he directed funding that challenged the centuries-old dogma that a damaged spinal cord could never be repaired. He kept working, too, directing *In the Gloaming* (1997) and *The Brooke Ellison Story* (2004), writing the bestselling memoir *Still Me* (1998), whose audiobook won a Grammy, and returning to acting on *Smallville*. He died on October 10, 2004, at fifty-two.

Why Christopher Is Called a Genius

The honest case for Reeve's genius does not rest primarily on acting. He was a fine, intelligent, classically trained actor, but his screen work - Superman aside - is not what the word usually reaches for. The genius, such as it is, was one of will, strategy, and moral leadership after his injury. The specific quality involved was the capacity to convert personal catastrophe into public infrastructure: to master the science well enough to argue it before senators, to build and steer a foundation, and to reframe an entire field's assumptions about what was possible. That is closer to the intelligence of a movement-builder than a laboratory mind. The counter-case is important and fair. Reeve was not a scientist; he funded and lobbied rather than discovered, and the cure he so publicly hoped for did not arrive in his lifetime. Some found his optimism about walking again unrealistic. "Genius" is a generous word for advocacy, however brilliant. But the effect was real and measurable - budgets, laws, research centers, and a shifted scientific consensus - achieved by a man who could no longer move his own hands. If genius includes the rare ability to bend the world's attention and resources toward a problem it had given up on, Reeve has a genuine claim.

Legacy

Reeve won BAFTA, Emmy, Grammy, and Screen Actors Guild honors across his career, but his monument is the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which remains a leading force in paralysis research and care. He is remembered less for the flight than for the fall, and for what he did afterward - proving, in the phrase he made his own, that nothing is impossible. The actor who once persuaded audiences a man could fly spent his final decade persuading the world that broken spines might one day be healed.

Achievements

• Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Hosted Nonfiction Series or Special
• New Jersey Hall of Fame — 2012
• Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award — 2003
• Educated at Juilliard School, Cornell University and Princeton Day School
• Worked as television actor, film actor and film director