Biography of Christopher Reeve:- American actor who gained worldwide fame after legendary superhero Superman incarnate in 1978.
After the divorce of his parents in 1956, he and his brother, Benjamin (1953), grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, Charge of his mother, who remarried a few years later and gave him two other brothers, Jeff and Kevin.
Biography of Christopher Reeve
- Born:- 25 September 1952, New York City, New York, United States
- Died:- 10 October 2004, Northern Westchester Hospital, Mount Kisco, New York, United States
- Height:- 1.93 m
- Spouse:- Dana Reeve (m. 1992–2004)
Reeve studied at the Princeton Day School, where he was assistant director of the orchestra of the institute, besides singing in a local choir, in which he tempered his good baritone voice, and working regularly since adolescence, as an actor ( Debuted with fifteen years at the Williamstown Theater Festival).
See Also: Biography of Vsevolod Meyerhold
He continued his artistic training at Cornell University, where before graduating in 1974, he was one of the two selected actors (the other was his friend Robin Williams) to study drama at the Juilliard School in New York with the renowned John Houseman.
Meanwhile, she worked on a television series ( Love of Life , 1974-1976), starred in a work starring Katharine Hepburn ( A Matter of Gravity , 1976) and landed a brief role in the David Greene film Red Alert: Neptune Sunken (1977).
Superman the hero
Born athlete, excellent swimmer, amateur ice hockey and horse riding and licensed pilot, physical handsomeness, with 1.93 meters tall and lush appearance of good – natured boy whose features were strikingly resembled the comic book hero, earned him the role of Clark Kent in Superman (1978) Richard Donner, an expensive blockbuster which featured a cast so bright (Marlon Brando, Susannah York, Glenn Ford , Terence Stamp, Trevor Howard) and opaque was quality, a fact that no Had no impact at all on the film, judging by its impressive commercial success.
Reeve, who earned $ 250,000 for that first starring job (compared to Brando’s $ 14 million for his brief supporting role, but a fortune for him), employed them in a new house he occupied with his new wife, British models Gae Exton, mother of their first two children, Matthew (1979) and Alexandra (1982).
One of the legacies of the Reagan era that enjoy better health is the cinematic sagas. It was during his rule when screens all over the world began to populate with serial superheroes (Rocky, Mad Max, Rambo …), and Superman was not going to be an exception.
It did not even give Reeve time to project his future as an actor when he was already immersed in Superman II (1980), whose repercussion multiplied that of the previous one, and this generated Superman III (1983), both of Richard Lester.
And the actor, who had appeared in other films – Somewhere in Time (1980), by Jeannot Szwarc; Sidney Lumet’s Trap of Death (1982); Monsenor (1983), by Frank Perry – assuming very different roles, I saw how, despite this,
The wake of Clark Kent
It was commented already that Reeve could not remove the character. That success buried him in life, just as it had happened to Johnny Weismuller with Tarzan or to Bela Lugosi with Dracula. That he was trying to prove his talent over and over again without succeeding.
In fact, it has come to be said that he “consoled” himself from this alleged dislike on television, a medium in which, in effect, he developed an enormous activity until the end of his life.
A little probing in its trajectory, nevertheless, not everything seems so clear. It is true that this identification has persisted, but so too has the actor declined to star in many successful films such as American Gigolo (1980), Fire in the Body (1981), Mutiny on Board (1984), Pursued (1987), or Total Challenge (1990), which perhaps would have given him a different trajectory, and instead not only did not reject, but even wrote the script and intervened in Sidney Furie’s Superman IV (1987) production , the fourth sequel to the saga.
However, although this renewed choice, in addition to making it very rich in a short time, could influence his career, did not affect his worth as an actor, which he recorded in titles such as The Reporter 42th Street (1987), By Jerry Schatzberg; Interferences (1988), by Ted Kotcheff; What a ruin of function! (1992) by Peter Bogdanovich.
The Bostonians (1984) and What remains of the day (1993), of James Ivory; No Words (1994), by Ron Underwood; The People of the Damned (1995), by John Carpenter, or Free of Suspicion (1995), by Steven Schachter. And, in the scenarios,
Meanwhile, Reeve divorced his first wife in 1987 and five years later, in 1992, he remarried to actress Dana Morosini, mother of his son Will (1992) and his faithful companion to the end.
Marked by tragedy
On May 27, 1995 he marked the future life of Christopher Reeve. He participated in an equestrian contest in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a fall of his horse caused the fracture of two cervical vertebrae and severed the spinal cord. Since then he remained in a wheelchair, with assisted breathing.
It was perhaps the strong contrast between the character of fiction that launched him to stardom, and the physical consequences of the accident suffered which added more pain to the tragedy.
But the actor, far from hiding in what would have been an understandable absence of the means, with an unusual force of will, turned his image of reduced superman into reference of the fight of those who suffer a similar injury, and the hero of celluloid Lost greatness to the vital breath and exemplary attitude of the immense man in Christopher Reeve.
In March of 1996 he was acclaimed by the people of the cinema in the ceremony of delivery of the Oscars, in which it asked to the cinematographic industry that dedicated its efforts to pay more attention to the social problems.
To the surprise of many, a few months later he debuted as a director in a television film, In the Gloaming (1997), which tackled the AIDS issue with courage . He later repeated experience with The Brooke Ellison Story (2004).
He also wrote the Still Me biography , which transcribed to the album earned him the Grammy for Best Spoken Album of 1999, and the book Nothing is impossible. Reflections of a new life (2002), published in Spain in 2003 with the title Everything is possible , in which he also exposed his experiences.
Although most surprising was his reappearance as an actor in Jeff Bleckner’s The Window Opposite (1998), a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Inquisitive Window .
All this reflected his extraordinary desire for improvement, embodied in his daily life in a documentary by his son Matthew, Volveré an andar.
On October 10, 2004, he died as a result of a heart attack in a hospital in New York at the age of fifty-two. Three days after his death, Warner Bros. announced the election of Brandon Routh as the new Superman.
