The Superman star’s accident cut short his career – and changed his relationship with his children. Now, they are telling their story
On May 27 1995, film fans around the planet were dumbfounded by the news that Superman had been paralysed.
Christopher Reeve, a globally famous symbol of clean-cut all-American masculinity, was thrown from a horse and landed life-changingly on his neck. He was 42. Until his death 20 years ago this month, he breathed through a ventilator and could not move a muscle from his shoulders down.
Yet he did not vanish. The following year Reeve made a powerful appearance at the Academy Awards, where the image of Superman not in a cape but a wheelchair was seen by a global audience of two billion.
But what no one saw was his arduous journey there – strapped into a small plane to fly from coast to coast, then transported to the venue by customised van.
That footage, and much else like it showing the loving support and whirring machinery that made his life endurable, is unveiled next month in Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. It’s a moving, intimate, access-all-areas chronicle of a big-screen idol whose life pivoted into a less mythic form of heroism, surrounded by his wife Dana and his three children.
“You couldn’t even write it in a movie,” says the film’s Swiss co-director Ian Bonhôte.
“The mad sick irony of the invincible person becoming the weakest you can ever be.”
Reeve’s position in film history should not be underestimated. An unknown 24-year-old New York theatre actor, in 1977 he flew to a casting session for Superman in London, defying the purist advice of fellow Juilliard graduate William Hurt to avoid commercial contamination. It seems unthinkable now that the producers ever considered, among others, the gurning Sylvester Stallone for the role.
The film was released in December 1978, setting box office records and grossing $300 million. Bulking up to don Superman’s torso-hugging bodysuit, Reeve became an overnight megastar as Hollywood’s first and defining comic-book superhero, in whose trail all successors walk.
So it’s a surprise that none of Reeve’s children have ever seen the film on the big screen.
“We had a VHS of Superman 1 and 2,” says Matthew, 44. “It wasn’t a big part of our lives at all,” adds Alexandra, 40, who reports “appreciating it for the first time two years ago when I watched it with my kids”.
“I don’t remember the first time I saw it,” says Will, 32. “I can’t remember the last time I saw it either.”
The documentary came about after the three Reeves were approached by Daniel Kilroy, an archive producer seeking home movie footage.
Having rejected previous requests to dramatise their father’s story, they agreed, says Matthew, that “enough time had passed since Dad died to introduce his story to a whole new generation of people who might not know who he was”.
Kilroy introduced the Reeves to Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, who had made McQueen and Rising Phoenix, a 2020 documentary about Paralympians. The directors were duly presented with an archival windfall of undigitised video.
“We didn’t know everything we were handing over,” admits Will. “Someone was always videotaping in our house. So there was a lot that we just hadn’t gone through.”
Reeve started filming his life after he separated from Gae Exton, the British mother of Matthew and Alexandra, whom he met while simultaneously shooting the first two Superman films at Pinewood. He would send video diaries to his children growing up back in the UK.
“They were so cringey that the kids asked him to stop,” says Bonhôte.
Meanwhile, Reeve’s wife Dana – whom he met after leaving Exton and married in 1992 – regularly wielded a camcorder following the birth of Will.
Matthew took over whenever visiting, and later made two documentaries about his father. Then there was audio archive of Reeve reading his memoir Still Me, published in 1998. Super/Man draws on all these sources.
Central to the film is the three children’s testimony. It struck Ettedgui that “each seemed to encapsulate a facet of Christopher Reeve’s character”.
The experience of seeing the siblings walk into a room corroborates this. They are notably tall – an inheritance, they loyally insist, from their mothers too.
Six foot (1.83m) in flats with a mid-Atlantic accent and her father’s chiselled profile, Alexandra is a lawyer who campaigns for civil rights in the digital age.
Matthew, a quietly spoken film producer who sounds much more English, has the neatly parted thatch lacking only Superman’s cowlick. Will got the beefy shoulders and the jovial ease. He’s also a news correspondent on ABC.
“Don’t compare me with Clark Kent,” he says. “I have great eyesight.”
Contributing to the film, and recalling their father’s daily struggles, required them to relive trauma. News footage captured the older children, then 15 and 11, looking vulnerable as they arrived jet-lagged at the hospital in Virginia where their father’s life hung in the balance, having received the news in the UK.
“I remember the whole thing from the phone call,” says Matthew. “You kind of go into a state of just not thinking too far ahead, because there’s no way to know.”
Alexandra remembers “very clearly Dana saying, ‘He’s going to look very different. He’s lying in this bed but it’s still him, find his hand and hold it and talk to him.’
“She was coaching us in real time. She was giving us the survival skills.”
Will is seen breaking down in the film as he quotes a poem by his mother, Dana, who died of lung cancer 18 months after her husband.
“I miss the heat of the hands,” she wrote and he reads, over Matthew’s footage of the couple’s hands touching. How difficult was that?
“At that point in the eight-hour interview I’d been through the wringer already,” he says, “so it was no more difficult than the rest of it”.
The film is packed with the testimony of friends and colleagues – Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Daniels, Whoopi Goldberg, John Kerry – while Reeve’s Juilliard contemporary Robin Williams is an ever-hovering presence – “the embodiment of what it is to show up for a friend in need,” says Alexandra.
The more reluctant interviewee was Reeves’s ex-partner Gae Exton.
“They got me through the grandchildren,” she told the directors at last week’s premiere, and clearly found it bitterly hard to relive the moment Reeve walked out on her to embrace everything fame had to offer.
“What she realised was that she had the front row seat in the most extraordinary time in my dad’s life,” says Alexandra. “She saw that career take off like a rocket ship.”
Super/Man is a 360-degrees portrait of disability, of a blended family overcoming obstacles together, and of Reeve’s defiant second act as a fundraiser. Somehow it contrives not to be a soupy hagiography.
“We all agreed that we didn’t want to have a varnished portrait [that put] their dad on a pedestal,” says Ettedgui. “The more open you can be about his flaws the more remarkable the story is. In the film he says it himself. ‘I had to break my neck in order to learn some of this stuff.’ It was the key line for us.”
Thus his infidelities are not ducked as the temptations of celebrity prove irresistible. Nor are Reeve’s failure to fly to box office success in any other film, and his early missteps as he threw himself into disability activism.
He was particularly criticised for falsely raising hopes when he appeared to walk in an ad shown during the 2000 Super Bowl.
The story also focusses on Reeve’s vexed relationship with a highly intellectual father. The approval of poet and translator FD Reeve was constantly withheld, never more than when he cracked open the champagne only to discover his son had been cast as a comic book hero – and not in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman.
Then when his own children visited from England, in his own way Reeve repeated the error by pressganging them onto horses and into yachts.
“He got to know us as people only after the accident,” Matthew says in the film.
“How we spent together completely changed,” he adds. “Rather than doing all the activities or trips, we were through circumstances forced to sit down and talk.”
The Reeves family had no say in the final edit. That didn’t stop the directors in London from nervously awaiting their verdict.
At the start of the Zoom call straight after the siblings watched it together in New York, Ettedgui “caught someone saying, ‘That was a bit s***’.” Presumably Will?
“He was definitely winding us up. It was the best moment for us that they were extremely moved by it and really happy.”
Their one request was for more “moments of extreme joy”, in Alexandra’s words.
“That’s important,” she adds. “We were a normal happy household, just our circumstances were different.”
Four or five shots of happy family life were found and added. What couldn’t be shown were all the times they went to films or plays or restaurants, because no one ever filmed those outings.
“They’re called home movies for a reason,” says Will, “not dinner-down-the-street movies. Considering that I had a movie star dad who was in a wheelchair, I had a very normal childhood.”
Reeve would harness his visibility to campaign for spinal injury research, and his children are now all on the board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which remains a leading charity in the field. These are among the film’s hard-won highs. How accurate do they feel it captures the inevitable, grinding lows?
“In every single dream Dad had he was walking,” says Alexandra.
“So you wake up and you give yourself 10 minutes and then you close the door and get on with your life. It wasn’t sunshine and puppies every day. It was hard and he persisted. And that’s discipline.”
“Of course there were times when he would have serious medical setbacks,” Matthew remembers.
“One time a pressure sore that opened on his ankle just would not heal to the point where amputation was not ruled out. But it kind of fuelled his fire and he willed his body to heal and it started getting better. I’m not saying he performed a miracle or anything…”
“That is what you’re saying,” chimes in Will. “That’s what the headline is.”
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is in NZ cinemas now
From where to get the best view to when the roads will close.