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October 11, 2004
RIP Man of Steel
The October 10 death of actor Christopher Reeve was just the latest death I wasn't ready for this year.One of my favorite interviews with Reeve was a relatively early one, in which the interviewer wrote that he'd expected Reeve, like most Hollywood stars then (and especially now!), to show up with the usual entourage. He arrived alone. The best line in the entire article was the interviewer describing Reeve as being taller sitting down than most men are standing up--! How true that turned out to be...
Reeve's spinal cord injury in 1995 happened a little over a year after Mom's. The difference of barely a few inches at the point of impact meant that Mom eventually learned to walk again, while Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down.
Aside from Reeve's acting career, I think more people came to admire him after the injury because of how gracefully he handled it. His most famous role was as Superman, pop culture's most enduring and physically powerful fictional character, but Reeve's shadow loomed larger with the actual disabled man that he was. It takes a special kind of person to turn your back on the fears and the anger and the shame and the pain and embrace life anyway.
It takes an even more special kind of person to "return" to your most famous role in its most current setting. I'm going to miss Smallville's Dr. Virgil Swann, as well.
In a strange way, it's like losing Aaron again, or at least another small part of him that was special to me. We LOVED Christopher Reeve in the Superman movies -- he made the Man of Steel so much fun. We both loved Reeve's Muppet Show episode so much we recorded it -- on cassette tape (hey, we didn't have VCRs yet, whippersnappers)! You simply haven't lived until you've heard Reeve's duet with Miss Piggy on that old standard, East of the Sun (West of the Moon)!
It was such a strange set of events today. American Movie Classics had already scheduled a showing of Somewhere in Time for tonight, and Reeve's passing was noted at the end of a scheduled NPR Marketplace radio story, Creating A Superhero, which was about the new book by Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, which focuses primarily on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the two young men who... created Superman.
Aside from Reeve's acting career, I think more people came to admire him after the injury because of how gracefully he handled it. His most famous role was as Superman, pop culture's most enduring and physically powerful fictional character, but Reeve's shadow loomed larger with the actual disabled man that he was. It takes a special kind of person to turn your back on the fears and the anger and the shame and the pain and embrace life anyway.
It takes an even more special kind of person to "return" to your most famous role in its most current setting. I'm going to miss Smallville's Dr. Virgil Swann, as well.
In a strange way, it's like losing Aaron again, or at least another small part of him that was special to me. We LOVED Christopher Reeve in the Superman movies -- he made the Man of Steel so much fun. We both loved Reeve's Muppet Show episode so much we recorded it -- on cassette tape (hey, we didn't have VCRs yet, whippersnappers)! You simply haven't lived until you've heard Reeve's duet with Miss Piggy on that old standard, East of the Sun (West of the Moon)!
It was such a strange set of events today. American Movie Classics had already scheduled a showing of Somewhere in Time for tonight, and Reeve's passing was noted at the end of a scheduled NPR Marketplace radio story, Creating A Superhero, which was about the new book by Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, which focuses primarily on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the two young men who... created Superman.
Posted by Val at October 11, 2004 10:55 PM
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