It's eerie being in a room with the Reeve siblings. All three are dead ringers for their father, Christopher. Matthew, 44, resembles Reeve as Clark Ke
It’s eerie being in a room with the Reeve siblings. All three are dead ringers for their father, Christopher. Matthew, 44, resembles Reeve as Clark Kent. Alexandra, 40, shares his angular beauty. The youngest, Will, 32, looks like him as Superman. They are almost as tall as their 6ft 4in father: Will is 6ft 3in, Alexandra is 6ft, and Matthew is 6ft 2in. As for their jobs, Matthew makes films, Alexandra is a legislation lawyer based in Washington DC, and Will is a TV sports journalist. Their father was a sport-obsessed actor-turned-director who campaigned to change the law on several fronts, most notably regarding disabled people.
“Strong genes!” Alexandra says, smiling at the other two. It’s not just that, I say. Your careers seem to reflect your father’s. Another smile. “It’s so strange,” Alexandra says. “We think about it all the time. We have split his passions between the three of us.”
Devoted siblings… Will, Alexandra, and Matthew at the premiere of Super/Man at the London film festival. Photograph: James Veysey/REX/Shutterstock
It’s 20 years since Reeve died, 29 years since he broke his neck after being thrown from his horse, and 46 years since the first of his four Superman films came out. That film broke any number of box-office records and made Reeve a global star. Nobody mastered the screwball comedy of Superman and his bumbling alter ego reporter Clark Kent as convincingly as Reeve.
By the time he died, nine years after he was paralyzed from the neck down, we realized that Reeve had a touch of Superman himself. But we didn’t know what a complex man he was. Now a new documentary, featuring his children and numerous household names, chronicles his life in all its intricate layers. The film has just had its British premiere at the London film festival, and we are meeting at a London hotel to chat about it. While Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story documents a unique individual, it also provides lessons for all of us. To distill it to its essence, how do we cope when the shit really hits the fan?
Reeve was born in New York into a well-to-do American family that goes back to the Pilgrim Fathers on his maternal side. His paternal grandfather was the chief executive of the Prudential life insurance company, his father Franklin a poet and professor of literature, and his mother Barbara a journalist. Reeve had a privileged, successful, and troubled childhood. He appeared to have it all: he was handsome, academic, a gifted actor and musician, and a natural sportsman. Yet he felt he could never be good enough to satisfy his father. His parents divorced when he was four, both going on to remarry and have more children. The family became forked and knotted. He didn’t quite know how he fitted in, or with whom. Reeve promised himself that when he grew up he would stay with the mother of his children and not make excessive demands of his offspring.
Yet it turned out he had more of his father’s genes than he had hoped, for good and bad. He sailed through exams, did well at everything he put his mind to, and turned out to be just as competitive as Franklin. After a trip to France in his teens, he returned home fluent in French – he’d not spoken a word of English in his time there. He went to the elite Cornell university and was one of 20 candidates out of 2,000 to win a place to study drama at the even more elite Juilliard School. He and his best friend Robin Williams were the only students in their year selected for the Juilliard’s advanced course.
At the age of 23, he auditioned for A Matter of Gravity on Broadway starring Katharine Hepburn, and was cast as her grandson. At the same time, he was appearing on TV in the soap opera Love of Life. He was so exhausted and living off such a poor diet that he fainted before he got his first line out. But it didn’t matter – Hepburn had taken a shine to him.
He took his theatre extremely seriously, as did his peers and his father. When he told his actor friend William Hurt he had an audition to play Superman in a movie, Hurt warned Reeve against selling out. Not that there was any chance of him getting the part. A number of stars coveted the role, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Neil Diamond, while Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, and Dustin Hoffman were considered, and Robert Redford and Clint Eastwood turned it down. When he was cast – against all expectation – Franklin bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate with him. But he had misheard. He thought Reeve had got a part in the Bernard Shaw play Man and Superman.
Would Franklin really have preferred Reeve to get a part in a tiny production of Man and Superman to playing the lead role in a blockbuster movie? “Seems like it!” Matthew says. “If you think about it, he was a literature professor, so theatre was the way of connecting with his son. Theatre is high art, not mainstream, commercial film.”
“It was a very traditional style of hard parenting,” Alexandra says. “In the US we call it Waspy parenting.”
“Patrician!” says Matthew, who seems anything but.
At the height of his success, Reeve and his father stopped talking for a number of years.
By the time of Superman II, Reeve was one of the world’s biggest stars. He was also now a father. Reeve had a relationship with British modeling executive Gae Exton, then left her for Jane Seymour, only to return to Gae when he discovered she was pregnant with Matthew. He and Gae went on to have Alexandra three years later, and lived in Britain where the Superman films were made.
As a little boy, Matthew remembers it dawning on him that his father was special. “Kids would come up and they’d want to spend time with him and get his autograph, but we still had a pretty normal childhood. It wasn’t California. We lived in London and New York for a reason – to have slightly more of a traditional upbringing.” Did Reeve enjoy his fame? “I think he took pride in how people connected with him, and the role of Superman in particular. It was fun to have kids come up, and he felt an obligation to live up to the hope that the kids were putting on you.”
Despite Reeve’s resolution, he and Gae split up when Matthew was seven and Alexandra was three. And despite his determination not to ape his father’s parenting, he did. He expected the best from his children, whether it was schoolwork, table manners, or sporting prowess. Alexandra says he didn’t treat children differently from adults, which was great in a way, not so good in others.
“For example, we’d be skiing, and he would see the ‘double black diamond’ run for expert skiers. For Dad, it didn’t matter your age, you just did it.” How old was she? “About six.” That’s crazy, I say. She laughs. “His position was you could take it at a slower pace. He’d bomb down to the bottom and wait for you.”
Then there was tennis. “Whenever he played, he played hard – even against a child.” It never crossed his mind, she says, that he shouldn’t serve at full strength against…heathily. “But he wanted to win,” she adds.
Was he as competitive as he had been before the accident? “I would say driven rather than competitive,” Alexandra says. “There was an intense focus on pushing his body beyond what the doctors told him it was capable of doing.”
“He was now competitive with himself,” Matthew says. “If he breathed off the ventilator for 30 minutes on Tuesday, on Wednesday it would have to be 31 minutes.”
Do the siblings think their father changed after the accident? Alexandra says the whole family changed: “One of the residing feelings in our household is extreme gratitude. We didn’t walk around saying ‘thank you’ all the time, but there was a newfound appreciation among all of us for the way you spend time together, finding joy in the small moments. And the way we spent time together dramatically changed, so rather than being out and being active, the way you connected was just sitting in his office chatting. Which teenager sits and talks to their parents for two hours at a stretch? And suddenly that’s the way we connected.”
Reeve now spent time watching the world from his wheelchair. Did he become wiser? “I don’t know if he was wiser,” Alexandra says, “but he certainly had more perspective. Knowing how fragile things can be. Knowing not to sweat the small stuff. Knowing to be grateful for things you normally take for granted. That was probably the biggest change because it makes you reassess your relationships. It makes you bury the stupid quibbles and reforge friendships.” Crucially, he and Franklin made up after the accident.
Will, who was just shy of three at the time of the accident, says he’s not sure if his memories of Reeve before that time are real or forged by photographs and stories he’s been told. Either way, he thinks of his father as a man of action. “Prior to the accident, he could never sit still. The accident forced him to literally sit still, but figuratively he still couldn’t. He continued to push himself in every way – to grow as a husband, father, contributor to society.”
Will possesses one item of his father’s that he’s particularly proud of. “It’s a cover of the Wall Street Journal from 1997. He was gifted a gold plaque version of it, and the cover says: ‘The Reeve effect.’ There’s a picture of him and a graph that just goes tttttrrrrruh.” He arrows his left hand up to the sky. “And that shows the awareness of, and money allocated to, spinal cord injury research after his accident. The fact that our dad became the face of a movement and had such a tangible impact on people’s lives as a result was deeply important to him as a lasting legacy, and that continues today. If our dad believed in something, he would put his face, name, and voice to it, and effect change. And he did a great job of that.”
On 9 October 2004, Reeve attended a hockey match Will was playing in. He always loved to see his children play sports. Reeve was being treated for an infected ulcer that caused sepsis. That night he went into cardiac arrest after taking an antibiotic for the infection and fell into a coma. The next day he died. He was only 52 and, despite everything, seemed to have many good years ahead of him.
The children say it was Dana who got them through this period. By then, all three were living in the US. “Those early days, we had paparazzi outside the house,” Alexandra says. “It was a zoo.” She looks at the others. “D’you remember when they did a TV special and Dana took us into Dad’s bedroom and we all watched? It was a day or two after Dad passed away. Dana taught us how to go through it.”
Reeve with his wife Dana and son Will in 2004, just months before his death. Photograph: Carolyn Contino/BEI/Shutterstock
It’s amazing how often the siblings finish each other’s sentences; how symbiotic they seem. You sense that the death of Reeve and Dana has made them even closer. It’s remarkable that you’re so balanced and functional after what you’ve all been through – it would screw up so many families, I say. “We’d been given the tools,” Alexandra says. “It didn’t make it easy, but we’d been taught from a young age how you navigate crises. You keep breathing, you hug your loved ones really close, and you just put one foot in front of the other.”
She pauses, and looks at the others. “There’s this Pablo Neruda quote Dad used to have up on the wall: ‘From strong roots grow flourishing leaves.’ And we had very strong roots.”
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 1 November.
FAQs:
* What is the name of the documentary about the life of Christopher Reeve?
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
* When did Christopher Reeve die?
October 9, 2004
* How old was Christopher Reeve when he died?
52
* Who is the focal point of the documentary?
Christopher Reeve
* What is the title of the documentary?
Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
* When is the documentary being released in the UK and Ireland?
1 November
* Who is the director of the documentary?
Unknown
* What is the subject of the documentary?
The life of Christopher Reeve and his family
Note: I rewrote the content without adding any new information or tags, and without including the title. The article is now a rewritten version, condensed, and in a single piece.
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