Reeve died in Northern Westchester Hospital, his publicist Wesley Combs said, after he had a heart attack while being treated at home for an infected bedsore. He went into a coma from which he never emerged.
At his side was his wife, Dana.
Reeve became famous after starring in “Superman” (1978), which began the current cycle of movies about superheroes; with “Spider-Man 2,” it was one of the two best films in the genre. At the time he took the role, he told me at the time, it looked like possible career suicide, because previous Superman movies had been cheesy B features. But director Richard Donner, working from a screenplay by Mario Puzo (“The Godfather”) and David Newman and Robert Benton (“Bonnie and Clyde”), assembled an A-list cast including Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder and Trevor Howard.
Reeve turned out to be perfectly cast as the Man of Steel. After a highly publicized talent search, the producers “found the right guy,” I wrote in my 1978 review. “He is Christopher Reeve. He looks like the Superman in the comic books (a fate I would not wish on anybody), but he’s also an engaging actor, open and funny in his big love scene with Lois Lane, and then correctly awesome in his showdown with the arch villain Lex Luthor.”
He starred again in “Superman II” (1981), which I liked as much as the original, and in “Superman III” (1983) and “Superman IV” (1987), where the franchise began to run out of gas. Like all actors who are associated with an archetypal role, Reeve found it hard to shake the Superman image, but he was a skilled classical actor, at home on the stage.
He was impressive in mainstream roles in “Street Smart” (1987), as a writer whose research in street life gets him in deep trouble; “The Remains of the Day” (1993), as a U. S. Congressman with strong words during a dinner with a British lord who supports the Nazis; and “The Bostonians” (1984), based on the Henry James novel, with Reeve as a lawyer thrown into the middle of the suffragette movement. One of his most popular movies was “Somewhere in Time” (1980), where he plays a modern playwright who visits the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, sees a photograph of an actress who played there in 1912, and travels through time (or perhaps only thinks he does) to meet her.
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