2. 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.

3. "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."

4. 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."

5. 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.

6. 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."

7. 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.

8. POSTED BY ATTORNEY RENE G. GARCIA:
For a free consultation please call us at 1-866- SCAFFOLD or 212-725-1313.
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