university. He was given his own grand piano before he turned 16, and developed a virtuoso skill on it.
But family life was not easy. His parents divorced when he was four and he and his younger brother Benjamin felt like pawns in a game of bitter rows and long silences, moving with their mother to New Jersey where she married an investment banker a few years later. By the age of eight he had decided to become an actor, later landing a part in a TV soap opera, followed by his first Broadway role in 1976, appearing in A Matter Of Gravity, opposite Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn became very fond of Reeve, both as an actor and as a person, and teased him that he would look after her when she retired. Ironically, his reply was, "Miss Hepburn, I don't think I'll live that long."
However, he was still a virtual unknown in 1977 (with just one film role to his name) when he was chosen from 200 hopefuls to portray the silver screen incarnation of Clark Kent, the alter ego of the invincible superhero,
Superman. The role launched Reeve as an international megastar with homes in London, New York and Hollywood, as well as an army of female admirers. In 1977, dressed in his red boots for his new role, he
accidentally stepped on the toe of London model agent Gae Exton in the canteen at Pinewood Studios, London, where Superman was being filmed. Although not exactly the most romantic encounter, it was not long before they fell in love. He was attracted by the fact that she wasn't an actress like his previous girlfriends. They began dating and, within months, Gae had moved into his Knightsbridge flat. Around this time, Superman: The Movie opened to incredible success around the world, being nominated for three Academy Awards, and achieving another ten wins and fourteen nominations in other award ceremonies, such as the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes. By early 1979, Gae was unexpectedly pregnant with their first child. In those days, Reeve claimed to be so queasy at the sight of blood that he almost stayed away from the birth. However, he briefly overcame his fears and was present for the birth of Matthew Reeve, before immediately departing for Switzerland for a skiing holiday, leaving Gae with post-natal depression.
However, their relationship endured, the couple moving to New York, then Hollywood and then back to London, where Reeve tried to throw off his action man image. But he never settled to domesticity, continuing to enjoy hell-raising sessions in New York with old drama school friend Robin Williams, and even dating other women, claiming that he and Gae had an understanding. All seemed well between them in 1983 when Gae bore their second child, Alexandra Reeve, who was born in London. This time, Reeve rushed back from filming in Yugoslavia to be there for the birth. But their seeming harmony was not to last - four years later, their relationship had ended. On 30 June 1987, the then-35-year-old Reeve then met 24-year-old Dana Morosini, the actress/singer daughter of a doctor. He was instantly captivated by her, and their ensuing relationship turned the reluctant Reeve into a born-again romantic. Within five months, they were living together in New York. Though his career was going into a downward spiral and he made an ever-increasing number of appearances in adverts or inexpensive made-for-TV movies, the two married on 11 April 1992. Relocating to a smaller New York flat, their son Will was born two months after their wedding.
Strangely, Reeve had an uncanny premonition of his future accident when he was cast as a paraplegic policeman in the TV movie Above Suspicion, shortly before participating in the tragic showjumping event that effectively ended his life. As he liked to research his roles thoroughly, Reeve even visited a spinal injury unit and had been overwhelmed by the sheer injustice of what he saw, and he subsequently objected when the film's producers wanted a happy ending where the paralysed police officer got out of his wheelchair and walked again. "Things like that just don't happen" he said.
The day of his own accident commenced with no such foreboding or omen, however. It was ideal weather on Memorial Day 1995 when Reeve, a relative newcomer to showjumping, mounted his favourite horse Eastern Express for an equestrian competition, with Dana and their toddler Will watching from the stands. Then came the fall. The horse refused the third fence and threw Reeve from its back. He landed on his head and snapped his neck in the worst place possible. "Superman is down" the commentator remarked casually, oblivious to just how serious the situation really was. Reeve lay motionless, the blood draining from his face and his lips turning blue. He had stopped breathing by the time paramedics reached him and began pumping oxygen into his lungs. He was airlifted to one of the best medical facilities in America, where he hung between life and death for five days, while Dana stubbornly refused to admit to the reality of the accident. Reeve had fractured the two uppermost vertebrae and severely damaged his spinal cord, and had so many fragments of bone floating around the affected area that a
neurosurgeon took seven hours to extract them. Miraculously, however, he had suffered no brain damage.
He had suffered what is known as a 'hangman's injury', a fracture of the top vertebra that results in extensive paralysis, and usually death. These were, for him, the darkest days. The doctors told him he would never again experience any feeling below the neck, nor would he ever walk again. For a physically daring man who stood at 6ft 4in, performed all his own stunts on set, and was an accomplished pilot, sailor, scuba diver, skier, rider and classical pianist, it was a fate worse than death.
For him, the following days and weeks were the darkest. He could barely raise a smile when Robin Williams visited him and clowned around dressed as a doctor. Confined to a wheelchair in the Kessler Rehabilitation
Institute in New Jersey, he was unable to fight his dark moods as skin and kidney infections and pneumonia ravaged his body. New medication incurred something akin to a heart attack in the early days. With so many
complications, no one except Dana sustained much hope. Most crushing of all were the times when he would have dreams about being whole, playing with his children, only to wake up and be jolted back to cruel reality.
This cruel reality depressed him so much that he seriously considered ending his own life. However, with Dana's reassurance that he was still the same man she married and still loved, and realising that his three children needed him, he eventually fought back, using each tiny success - the first word spoken, the first drink - to bolster his faltering morale. With her help, he began to devour all the reading matter he could find on the matter of the spinal cord.
Then, he discovered that a team of scientists believed the spinal cord could be regenerated, claiming success with animal experiments. The possibility of a breakthrough instantly dominated his life. He set off on the long, slow road to a recovery of sorts, astounding doctors in 1996 by taking ten successive breaths without the assistance of his
ever-present ventilator. By 2000, he was able to move his fingers, wrist and feet. He gave himself until he was 50 to achieve his ambition of walking again, and although the landmark date came and went in 2002, in every other way, his life was a success. He used his celebrity status to campaign for stem cell research, making it an issue in the then-presidential campaign.
His days in the rehabilitation centre started at 7am, when his arms and legs were stretched to prevent muscle and tendon shrinkage. Electrical stimulation helped to strengthen his muscles. His legs were strapped to a
power-assisted bicycle to force them to exercise. With a team of physiotherapists supporting his every limb, he would 'stand' on a treadmill, the idea being that by forcing his arms and legs to move, he would be able to send signals to his brain to aid his recovery. Gradually, he started to regain sensation in other parts of his body, and could
once again feel the touch of his wife and children. Such treatment was very expensive even for a film star - £1,400 a day - totalling £511,000 per year, of which two-thirds was paid by insurance and the remainder by a substantial disability benefit from three showbusiness unions. During Reeve's final years, his long-time friend Robin Williams helped to pay for the treatment costs. During one such workout in August 2000, he injured himself again after falling out of his wheelchair and breaking his leg.
Less than a year after his accident, he was traveling all over America discussing disability issues. He established his own research centre to fund scientists willing to go for any breakthrough in spinal cord research that might overturn established medical opinion that it was impossible to regenerate. He relentlessly lobbied politicians to increase insurance benefits for catastrophic injuries and even brought his pleas for stem cell research to the attention of President George W Bush and his opposing candidate for the Presidency, John Kerry. He moved the 1996 Oscars audience to tears with a call for more movies about social issues. Amazingly, he even managed to return to Hollywood, directing the TV film In The Gloaming, which was nominated for five Emmys, and even starring in a 1998 remake of the Hitchcock thriller Rear Window, in which a paralysed man in a wheelchair solves a murder. He also served as executive producer on this movie.
On May 3, 2002, Reeve and his wife opened the first centre in the United States devoted to helping paralyzed people to live more independently, in Short Hills, New Jersey. Known as the Christopher And Dana Reeve
Paralysis Foundation Center, the facility operates its own website, publishes "Paralysis Resource Guide", and is home to the largest assortment of paralysis-related publications in America. The Reeve Family Foundation has also donated approximately $22 million of grants to paralysis researchers. In January 2004, Reeve was distinguished with the Bernardo O'Higgins order by the Chilean chancellor, for his humanitarian work.
One day, Reeve was lying in bed with Dana when he realised he could feel his wife's touch and make love to her again. Before his death, he had regained sensation in nearly 90 per cent of his body, could feel a pin prick on most parts of his body, and could differentiate between hot and cold temperatures. The end was brought about by something very common among paraplegics; blood poisoning by way of bed sores, which lead to a fatal heart attack. He had been suffering from a pressure wound, and in the week leading up to his death, the wound had become severely infected, spreading into his bloodstream. Reeve suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma at his farmhouse home outside New York. He died in Northern Westchester Hospital, Mount Kisco, New York, the next day, on October 12, 2004, with Dana at his bedside.
It was the cruelest irony imaginable - that the man who had
portrayed the universe's most powerful being should be defeated by something so simple. He had lived to see scientists in Florida the same year regrow nerve fibres in laboratory experiments, creating the potential to eventually reconstruct damaged spinal cords. The much-anticipated breakthrough unfortunately came too late for the actor-turned-campaigner, but his remarkable courage and stamina proved that, just like his famous character, he was a real life Superman.
Even after his death, he continued to receive awards and recognition for his work. On May 18, 2005, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Of Letters by the State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, and two days later, he was posthumously awarded an honorary Doctor Of Humane Letters degree at Stony Brook University. This degree was accepted by Stony Brook graduate Brooke Ellison, whose own life and death battle with paralysis had been the subject of a 2004 made-for-TV movie directed by Reeve. A great number of political cartoons were drawn to
commemmorate his death, many of them Superman-themed, depicting such scenes as Superman bringing flowers to Reeve's grave, or Reeve as Superman flying away from his wheelchair.
In a tragic postscript to his life, ten months after Reeve passed away, Dana, his wife of fourteen years, was diagnosed with lung cancer. On 6 March 2006, the disease tragically claimed her life. She was only 44 years old. She and Christopher are survived by Matthew, 26, Alexandra, 23, and Will, 14. Before she died, Dana paid tribute to her husband, saying, "I look to him as the ultimate example of defying the odds with strength, courage and hope in the face of life's adversities."
