Biography

Christopher Reeve

September 25, 1952 - October 10, 2004

Part I

 
 
Christopher Reeve was born September 25, 1952, in New York City. When he was four, his parents (journalist Barbara Johnson and writer/professor Franklin Reeve) divorced. His mother moved with sons Christopher and Benjamin to Princeton, New Jersey, and married an investment banker a few years later. After the divorce, the boys also spent substantial visitation time with their father, who writing under the name F. D. Reeve, is a noted novelist, poet, and scholar of Russian literature. While with him, Chris and Ben were exposed to a stimulating intellectual environment that included Sunday dinners with F. D. Reeve's friends: Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Meanwhile, Reeve's stepfather, Tristam Johnson, generously paid tuition for the boys to attend the exclusive and academically challenging Princeton Day School.

  "Chris was extraordinary," his mother recalled to an Asbury Park Press reporter. "He was endowed with a great many extraordinary talents. He had a wonderful mind, wide-ranging interests, a willingness to take risks. He was an athlete and scholar with a passion for acting, which began very, very early." Reeve traced his love of acting back to the early years of his childhood when he and his younger brother would climb inside cardboard grocery cartons and pretend they were pirate ships. "To us they became pirate ships simply because we said they were" Reeve said. "The ability to retain at least some of this childhood innocence is essential to fine acting." By age eight, he had appeared in school plays, become interested in music, and was taking piano lessons. At age nine, he was picked to be in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Yeoman of the Guard for Princeton's professional theater, the McCarter Theatre. "While I was growing up," Reeve recalls, "I never once asked myself, 'Who am I?' or 'What am I doing?' Right from the beginning, the theater was like home to me. It seemed to be what I did best. I never doubted that I belonged in it." Those he worked with were convinced as well. Milton Lyon, the Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre who did Finian's Rainbow and South Pacific with Reeve, told him when he was about 14 years old: "Chris, you better decide what you want, because you're going to get it."

 At age 15, Reeve got a summer apprenticeship at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. By age 16, he had an agent. At Princeton Day School, Reeve participated in various school activities including being President of the Drama Club and Student Director of The Glee Club. Reeve later said about those years, "I loved the theater so much. But I began to feel guilty. I thought I wasn't giving enough time to school. So I joined as many school clubs and teams as I could. I played on the ice hockey team. I was in the school orchestra. I even sang with a choral group!" After graduating from high school, Reeve toured the country as Celeste Holm's leading man in The Irregular Verb to Love, then went on to college at Cornell, although he continued to work simultaneously as a professional actor, "thanks to an understanding agent who'd set up auditions and meetings around my class schedule."

Reeve had a special love for ice hockey, a sport that he played from the peewee level through high school where he was Princeton Day's number one goalie for all four years. He thought of pursuing the sport as a career until his freshman tryout at Cornell brought a reality check. The varsity team there was the NCAA champion and Ken Dryden was the goalie. Reeve said, "On the first day of practice, I noticed that there were only two Americans and the rest were Canadians. I was in the goal, and the whole team lined up on the blue line, each with a puck, and they were supposed to take turns going from left to right taking a slapshot. They started to get out of sequence, and sometimes two or three were coming at me, faster than I'd ever seen a puck come at me in my entire lifetime. I got absolutely shelled, and I thought, 'You know, I'm probably going to end up with no teeth,' and so I retreated to the safety of the theatre department. That was the end of my hockey career. In retrospect, I made the right choice. And I still have all my teeth."

As part of his studies at Cornell University, where he majored in Music Theory and English, Reeve spent time studying theater in Britain and France. Of his work in England, where he obtained employment as a "dogsbody" at London's prestigious Old Vic theater, Reeve said: "I was a glorified errand boy, but it was a very exciting time there. I helped by teaching the British actors to speak with an American accent. Then I went to Paris to work with the Comedie Francaise." By the time of his graduation from college, Reeve had already performed in such widely respected theaters as the Boothbay (Maine) Playhouse, the Williamstown Theatre, the San Diego Shakespeare Festival, and the Loeb Drama Center. His roles included Victor in Private Lives, Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida, Beliaev in A Month In The Country, and Macheath in Threepenny Opera.

In lieu of his final year at Cornell, Reeve was one of two students accepted to advanced standing (Robin Williams was the other) at New York's famous Juilliard School of Performing Arts. Here he studied under the renowned John Houseman. When it became financially difficult for his stepfather to continue to pay for Reeve's education, he took the role of Ben Harper in the long-running television dramatic serial Love of Life. While Reeve continued his acting lessons and performed in the soap opera, he found time to audition for and win a coveted role in A Matter of Gravity, a new play slated for Broadway starring Katharine Hepburn in 1976. By this time, the demands of his career had become so great that Reeve was forced to give up his final year at Juilliard, but Reeve said of working with Hepburn: "In Gravity, I had the privilege of spending nine months working with one of the masters of the craft." The two became very close and stayed in touch until Hepburn's death in 2003.

In 1976, Reeve went to Los Angeles and got a small part in Gray Lady Down, a submarine adventure film. Back in New York City, he was in the off-broadway production My Life. During that production, Reeve auditioned and successfully screen tested for the 1978 movie Superman. Reeve's mother later said: "He took the Superman role, quite frankly, as a career move. He felt, even with the risks it entailed, that it would mean he would get a greater recognition and he could bypass the cattle call." Reeve portrayed Superman as "somebody that, you know, you can invite home for dinner... someone you could introduce your parents to." He made Superman believable by playing him as a hero with brains and a heart. Reeve said, "What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely." Reeve told Gene Siskel: "The key word for me on him (Superman) is 'inspiration.' He is a leader by inspiration. He sets an example. It's quite important that people realize that I don't see him as a glad-handing show-off, a one-man vigilante force who rights every wrong." For playing Clark Kent, Reeve reasoned that "there must be some difference stylistically between Clark and Superman. Otherwise you just have a pair of glasses standing in for a character, and I don't think that's enough for a modern audience." In 1986, Reeve added that "Superman is nothing more than a popular retelling of the Christ story, or Greek mythology. It's an archetype, watered down and made in vivid colors for twelve-year-old's mentality. It's pop mythology, which extends to the actor, then seeps over to a demand that that actor reflect the needs of the worshipers. The worship doesn't only go on in the temples - it goes on in the streets, and restaurants, in magazines. But, you know, I'm from New Jersey, I'm not from Olympus or Krypton, so back off 'cause I can't take the responsibility." The 18 months of shooting for that movie took place mostly in England, where Reeve met and began a relationship with modeling executive Gae Exton. This union produced two children, Matthew Exton born on December 20, 1979 and Alexandra "Ali" Exton born in 1983.

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