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Super People: Christopher Reeve’s Family Says Caregivers Are ‘Unsung Heroes’

‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story,’ in theaters now, tells the tale of the actor's life and death


spinner image Christopher Reeve pointing up in the air in the film Superman
Warner Bros/Alamy/Everett Collection

There’s the Christopher Reeve the world knew: a regal, imposing, classically handsome New Yorker who cemented his movie legacy as the Man of Steel in 1978’s Superman and went on to champion paralysis research after a debilitating 1995 accident rendered him quadriplegic.

​In honor of the 20th year anniversary of his death, his three kids and famous friends — among them Glenn Close and Susan Sarandon — remember the Chris they knew in the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story: Goofy. Sartorially-challenged. Highly ambitious. Deeply adventurous. Always up for a good time. And a connoisseur of embarrassing dad jokes.

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His middle child, Alexandra Reeve Givens, 40, fondly recalls that her dad's penchant for "fabulous voices."

"This is what happens when you have a classically trained actor for a father," she says. "He had an incredible Fozzie Bear when we were kids. Do you remember that?” she asks her brothers, Matthew and Will.

Indeed, they do.

Says Matthew, 44: “And bedtime stories, like doing voices to the characters. I remember him reading Doctor De Soto to us a lot, which is my son's favorite book right now. And he would do that so well. We went to a couple musicals and he would get up and dance in the aisles like you're like 11 … So humiliating.”

He did it, says Alexandra, because “he was just really excited. It was ‘The Buddy Holly Story,’ and that's his era and his people. And he was like, ‘We're getting up and we're dancing.’”

Matthew, a producer and writer, and Alexandra, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit organization that focuses on technology policy as it relates to human rights, now have children of their own; their younger half-brother, Will, 32, is a correspondent for ABC News.

spinner image Promotional art for the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
"Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story" details Reeve's rise to becoming a film star and his near-fatal horse-riding accident in 1995 that left him paralyzed from the neck down.
Alon Amir/Warner Bros.

The documentary isn't a schmaltzy, airbrushed, glossy ode to their dad, who went on to accomplish superhuman things in the wake of his accident — he founded his foundation along with wife Dana, directed a movie, and tirelessly campaigned for more research into spinal injuries and help for those impacted by them.

“It's not a sugar-coated sort of puff piece as it potentially could have been," Matthew says. "We felt that for the film to really work, it needed to have authenticity. We agreed we would say the things we hadn't shared publicly, we would tell the stories we'd kept private."

The real Reeve

The Reeve you see is virile and silly, charming and ridiculously handsome, but also selfish, driven and leery of commitment. Shortly after the birth of Matthew, for example, he went skiing, leaving his partner, Gae Exton, and their newborn to fend for themselves. But especially after his accident, you see Reeve mature and grow as a parent and a partner.

“Dad's parenting changed over time," Alexandra says. "He grew as a parent, including in particular after the accident when he related to us in new ways and we had new gratitude as a family for spending time together."

Through all the ups and downs, Dana Reeve worked hard to maintain a sense of normalcy, Alexandra says.

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"I think about … how they kept this bubble of normalcy for us without faking it. They let us know that there were hard days, but they also showed us the path out of those hard days," she remembers. "And that's turning to your family, finding joy in the small moments and being there for one another. That is how you raise resilient children. You don't hide them from the world, but you show them that the world can be tough and they're going to survive anyway. And that's a really powerful lesson that I try to honor now as a parent myself.”

​Reeve died from cardiac arrest on Oct. 10, 2004; in August 2005, Dana Reeve — a lifelong nonsmoker — announced that she had been diagnosed with lung cancer and died at age 44 on March 6, 2006, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.​

Mortality weighs heavily on the three Reeves. Life is not to be wasted, love is not to be squandered. But suffice it to say, none of them has anything but appreciation for the gift of aging, a life well lived.

“Look, put it this way: Matthew turns 45 on December 20th. He'll be the second person in our nuclear family to make it there,” says Will Reeve, 32. “I've always compared myself to my dad. By the time he was 26, he was Superman and his whole life had changed his trajectory. So for me, hitting 26 was a big milestone. I have to have everything figured out and I have to be crushing it on a heretofore unseen level, which then through the help of therapy and just rational thought and calming down a little bit, I realized this is not the case, and I can play the longer game.”

Learning extreme gratitude

Instead, says Will, “I think about my parents' legacy and how I can honor it as boldly and as quickly as possible without rushing through life and while realizing the gifts that I've been given already and the accomplishments that I've achieved already. I do think about all of that.”

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His sister says her dad’s accident taught the kids to have what she calls “extreme gratitude,” which means always being aware that nothing in life is guaranteed, especially that you’ll be around tomorrow.​

“So you take advantage of every single day. You don't let anything go unsaid. You tell your loved ones how you feel about them, and you savor every one of those moments,” she says.​

But familial love aside, Alexandra Reeve also understands the raw, hard physical and emotional labor that went into keeping her father alive. And a lot of that fell on his wife. She was not an exception, even though she had resources at her disposal: AARP research shows that of the nearly 48 million family caregivers in the US, 61% are working while juggling caregiving responsibilities, including assistance with daily living activities, medical or nursing tasks, coordinating services and supports, transportation, shopping, and serving as an advocate for their care recipient. Most family caregivers provide at least 20 hours of care each week, equal to an unpaid part-time job, according to AARP.​

“The caregivers are the unsung heroes of our society, and they shoulder so much of the weight every day and people don't pay attention to that," Alexandra says. "And so having Dana's story told here and seeing her light shine and how she was carrying the weight of our entire family with joy and grace and having it not even seem that hard because she had this radiating in her light and joy that still found happiness in tough circumstances, there's a lot of people doing that type of work around our country every day. And it's really meaningful to have that captured on screen."

spinner image Christopher Reeve at his home in New York
Christopher Reeve seen at his home in New York in 2022. Family says he was very conscious of the irony and the legacy of ‘Superman’ after the accident.
Jez Coulson/Panos/Redux

​'He rooted for everyone'

Dana Reeve always maintained a sense of boring normalcy, both when her husband was paralyzed, and after his death. While he was in a wheelchair, breathing through a ventilator, entirely helpless after a vigorous life spent skiing and horseback riding, Reeve, says Will, didn’t spend his hours immersed in self-pity, or mired in resentment. There was simply too much to do.​

“He rooted for everyone,” Will says. “He wanted the rest of us to live as robust and full and dynamic a life as we possibly could. He wanted us to follow our passions. He wanted us to live a normal, complex, complicated, and ultimately messily beautiful life. He didn't expect or demand or resent the fact that it wasn't a life that was completely centered around every moment of his day. He wanted to be a part of everyone else's life despite the fact that we needed to cater a lot of what we did to him."

That’s not to say Reeve was a saint. The documentary doesn’t file down his rougher edges: his utter despair at realizing what his post-accident life might be like; his guilt at how his paralysis impacted his family; his worry about earning enough to support his wife and three kids; his search for a new purpose once his acting career was sidelined.

Says Alexandra: “He kept going because he wanted to be there for Dana and for us. Dana kept going because she had to be there for our dad and for us. We kept going because we were trying to hold them up too. And so what you have is in a way, this beautiful house of cards where everyone's leaning in and the thing that's keeping them up is that everyone is propping up the other person. And you realize that even in really hard circumstances, being there for others and turning your attention to that can be the biggest source of strength. And it's nice to see the film capture that part of the dynamic of this family as well.”

A super man, indeed.

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