Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Always a superman
By Prasad Pereira
Sitting in a darkened cinema, I still remember seeing a Superman movie for the first time. Due to the delay in movies getting here, what I saw first was Superman III at the now non-existent Odeon in Kandy. The sound was bad, the print was far from pristine quality and there was a huge fellow in front of me, hampering almost a third of my view from the screen. With all the usual distractions of the cinema, what remains etched in my mind is the sight of Superman in his blue tights and red undies flying over the Grand Canyon with a maddening Richard Pryor in tow. It was truly a defining moment for 11-year-old me as I stared goggle-eyed at the Man of Steel actually taking flight. From the first moment I saw him, Christopher Reeve was Superman, majestic even in that rather absurd red and blue costume, taking on an assorted team of villains hell bent on destruction.

Little did I know that this actor would amount to so much more than being a mere footnote in movie history. Even to us, so far away from where we perceived everything to be happening, this man’s courage, determination and bravery in the face of extreme personal tragedy served not only to inspire me, but millions around the world. It was his tireless campaigning for stem cell research that gave many people hope and forced the systematic investigation into spinal cord injury into the political agenda after his accident, when he fell off his horse in 1995 and broke his neck.

Christopher Reeve was born on September 25, 1952 in New York City, to newspaper journalist Barbara Johnson and professor/writer Franklin Reeve. When he was four, his parents divorced, and Reeve and his brother went with their mother to Princeton, NJ, after she married her second husband, a stockbroker. He made his first foray into acting at the age of ten, going on stage in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeoman of the Guard at a theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

He graduated from Cornell University in 1974, and did his master’s at the elite, prestigious Juillard School of Performing Arts. He also spent time in Europe, working at London’s Old Vic and the Comedie Française of Paris. One of his earliest roles was the role of the conniving bigamist Ben Harper on the long-running soap opera Love of Life – a show he stayed with through 1978. During this period, he also made his Broadway debut, starring as Katherine Hepburn’s grandson in a production of A Matter of Gravity. His first film role was a minor part in the 1977 submarine disaster flick Gray Lady Down.

From among 200 aspirants, the athletic, six-foot-four Reeve was cast as Superman/Clark Kent in director Richard Donner’s handsome celluloid mounting of the depression-born DC comic book. Seen by many as a natural candidate for the part, Reeve insisted on doing his own stunts. And man, did the film soar! The film became the biggest earner ever for Warner Bros. at the time, grossing some 300 million dollars in the US alone. He did three more sequels, which culminated in the weakest entry in the series, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in 1987.

While filming Superman in London, Reeve met modeling agency co-founder Gae Exton. The couple had a son, Matthew, 25, and a daughter, Alexandra, 21, but never wed. He later married Dana Morosini and they had one son, Will, 12.

Despite Superman making him a star, Reeve also wanted to show he could do more. “I’ve flown, I’ve become evil, loved, stopped and turned the world backward, I’ve faced my peers, I’ve befriended children and small animals and I’ve rescued cats from trees,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1983, just before Superman III was released. “What else is there left for Superman to do that hasn’t been done?”

His accident in May 1995 completely changed his life, and also brought out the real superman in him. In the dark days soon after his accident he had contemplated ending it all, but says the sight of his wife and children made him give up the idea. He went through months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and longer periods without a respirator, and emerged to lobby Congress for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury. With the love and support of his wife Dana, he continued to lead calls for more research into such injuries.

Before his death, American presidential candidate John Kerry mentioned Reeve in a presidential debate, calling him a friend and pledging support to the stem cell research that the actor so tirelessly campaigned for.

Reeve was able to move his index finger in 2000, and a specialised workout made his legs and arms stronger. He vowed to walk again. He also said in an interview that the greatest thing was being able to feel the hugs of his wife and his three children again.

Since the accident, he also turned to directing, and even returned to acting in a 1998 TV reworking of Rear Window, a modern update of the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller about a man in a wheelchair who becomes convinced a neighbour has been murdered. Reeve won a Screen Actors Guild award for best actor in a TV movie or miniseries.

Last Saturday, Reeve went into cardiac arrest at his Pound Ridge home in New York, then went into a coma and died the next day in hospital surrounded by his family. He was 52. In the last week before his death, Reeve had developed a serious systemic infection from a pressure wound, a common complication for people living with paralysis.

And so the story ends. After seeing him fly in a darkened cinema in Kandy, I later got the chance to see the first Superman film – inclusive of Marlon Brando’s highly publicised extended cameo, and the one I enjoyed most as a child, Superman II. Even after seeing Dean Cain in the TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, the image I had of superman would always be of Reeve, majestic even in that rather absurd red and blue costume, sparring with the incomparable Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor.

Reeve will always be superman – more off screen than anywhere else, for it was his life that gave many an example of true courage, steel-eyed determination and the will to take on seemingly insurmountable odds. His resolve to never give up, and his courage in keeping hope alive despite being told everything to the contrary will always serve as a reminder of the strength and nobility of the human spirit.

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