Photo: D. Morrison/Daily Express/Hulton Archive / Getty Images
On October 10, 2004, the actor Christopher Reevewho became famous for his starring role in four Superman movies, died of heart failure at the age of 52 at a hospital near his home in Westchester County, New York.
The actor was born on September 25, 1952 in New York City and graduated from Cornell University and the Juilliard School. He made his Broadway debut in 1976 in A Matter of Gravity, starring Katharine Hepburn.
The 6’4” actor rose to fame in 1978, when was selected among 200 other actors for the lead role in Superman. Although he would play the action hero in three more films, Reeve was determined to “escape the cape” and avoid being pigeonholed.
As a result, he took on a variety of roles on stage and screen. Her film credits include Somewhere in Time (1980), Deathtrap (1983), The Remains of the Day (1993), and Village of the Damned (1995).
On May 27, 1995, Reeve, a strong athlete and avid horseman, was paralyzed from the neck down after he was thrown from his horse and broke his neck during an equestrian competition in Virginia.
The actor then became an advocate for people with spinal cord injuries and also lobbied for government funding of embryonic stem cell research.
During a speech at the 1996 Academy Awards, the actor urged the Hollywood community to make more movies about social issues. In addition to his fundraising and advocacy work, Reeve wrote two books about his life experiences and continued his acting career.
In 1997, he made his directorial debut with HBO’s In the Gloaming, which was nominated for five Emmy Awards, and in 1999 starred in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Rear Window, The Brooke Ellison Story, a film based on a true story about the first quadriplegic to graduate from Harvard University.
In 2000, Reeve, who kept an intensive physical therapy regimen From the moment of his accident, he was able to move his index finger, he publicly declared that he was determined to walk again.
In Reeve’s obituary in the New York Times, one of the doctors who treated him said, “Before [Reeve] there really was no hope. If you had a spinal cord injury like his you couldn’t do much, but he has changed all that, has shown that there is hope and that there are things that can be done.”
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