When Christopher Reeve was paralyzed after being thrown from a horse in 1995, wife Dana Reeve renewed the Superman star’s will to live.
For about 10 minutes, Christopher Reeve wanted to end his life. So when wife Dana Reeve told him to wait and, if he still felt that way in two years, then they’d figure it out, he knew what she was doing.
“On one level, you could say she used the oldest selling technique in the book,” the Superman star, who would’ve turned 73 on Sept. 25, recalled in his 2002 memoir Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life. “You offer customers a free trial, a free sample, with no obligation and no money down, in order to get them on the hook.”
But in this case, he continued, “On another level, a much deeper one where our love and respect for each other has always lived, she knew that I was in the first stage of a natural reaction to tragedy. Asking me to wait was the perfect course of action. She was giving me room, the freedom to make a choice, yet knowing what that choice would be in time.”
Chris was describing a moment that occurred in the ICU several days after he was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition on May 27, 1995.
He had suffered what doctors called a “complete” injury: His spinal cord was severed at the C-2 vertebra, rendering his brain unable to transmit signals to the rest of his body. He was paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own.
“When I first realized what my situation was, I thought, Maybe I’m too much trouble. Maybe this will be just too hard on everybody. Maybe I should just check out,” the actor said on Larry King Live the following year. “And my wife—my beautiful, extraordinary wife, Dana—put the end to it with one sentence. She said, ‘But you’re still you, and I love you. End of story.’”
One look at his children—Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve, whom he shared with ex-partner Gae Exton, and his and Dana’s son Will Reeve—and he further realized he had no choice but to stick around.
Getting around in a motorized wheelchair and breathing with the help of a ventilator, he continued to act, produce and direct, write two books (by dictating to an assistant), advocate for better care and insurance for the disabled community and fundraise for the American Paralysis Association (which later changed its name to the Christopher Reeve Foundation).
“Dana’s intuition about what my state of mind would be two years after the accident proved exactly right,” Chris noted in his 2002 book. “I was glad to be alive, not out of obligation to others, but because life was worth living.”
He also became a more present father, and now 33-year-old Will—who was a few weeks shy of his third birthday when his father’s accident occurred—remembered his dad always being there for him.
“Any milestone that I had—first day of school, birthdays, holidays—he was there for,” Will recalled to E! News ahead of the release of the 2024 documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. “He taught me how to ride a bike by telling me what to do, and that was meaningful,” not least because his dad at one point thought such moments would be impossible for him.
“Every milestone in my life was a milestone in his life while we were together,” Will said. “It didn’t matter he was in a wheelchair.”
Chris’ stated goal was to walk again—a 2000 Super Bowl commercial for Nuveen Investments in which the actor stood up and took steps, courtesy of special effects, was a jaw-dropper—and he was a supporter of embryonic stem cell research to treat spinal cord injuries and debilitating neurological conditions.
His causes inevitably became Dana’s as well, and because she was by his side throughout, the New Jersey-born actress was subsequently hailed as a superwoman for staying so strong.
And maybe she was a saint. But she was also just really in love and had a family to take care of, and she resisted the hyperbole.
“It bothers me to be thought of that way,” Dana told Good Housekeeping in 1997. “Of course I’m doing this. What other option is there? What happened was a truly terrifying, life-altering thing, and my initial response was just like being hit by a bucket of water.”
And while she certainly did a lot for him, “We decided I must be his wife, and not his nurse,” Dana told the New York Times in 1998. “Though I occasionally do his hair shampoo, because it’s a sexy, intimate thing. Chris is incredibly resilient. He will occasionally get down, hit rock bottom. I just listen, and try to find things that can help. Close physical contact is helpful.”
Chris’ daughter Alexandra, who shares 10-year-old son Christopher Russell Reeve Givens and a daughter with husband Garren Givens, told E! that her favorite moment in the documentary was a home movie clip (shot by her brother Matthew) in which Dana prepares a cup of coffee for her husband and gets into bed with him while he sips it through a straw.
Watching the film felt “like we just got two hours with our family back,” Alexandra said, “just these normal moments of family life captured again.”
Chris said his and Dana’s marriage was happy before the accident and in a way even “happier” for him afterward, explaining on Larry King Live in 1997, “Because every moment is so precious. I nearly died twice in 1995. So I’ve been to the edge and back. And the fact, you know, that everything that we do, every place we go, everything we see, we share it in a new light. And that really is just a triumph.”
And “I seriously tested the marriage vows,” he added. “You talk about ‘in sickness and health.’ We got more than we bargained for. But the fact is, Dana never flinched.”
The couple met in June 1987 when he was doing a play and she was singing in a cabaret at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. Dana admittedly wasn’t sure she could trust the 6-foot-4 heartthrob, who was only recently out of a 10-year relationship with model executive Exton.
“I made it very clear to him that I wanted to know his intentions,” Dana told Total Theater in 1999. “If it was going to be what-I-did-on-my-summer vacation, that yes, we could do that, but I wanted to know. We had been dating only a few weeks and he was very effusive, saying he loved me and could imaging spending the rest of his life with me. I said, ‘Now wait a minute. You’ve had a lot of women in your life. Is this part of what you do to woo them?’”
But Dana soon fell for both Superman and Clark Kent, finding the Cornell University grad and Juilliard alum had quite the keen intellect.
The pair were living together when, one night at dinner, as he recalled in his 1998 memoir Still Me, “I just put down my fork and asked her to marry me.” (The book’s title was inspired by his wife’s life-saving assurance of “you’re still you.”)
He had “always been afraid of marriage,” Chris acknowledged in Nothing Is Impossible, “perhaps because there had been a long history of failures for many generations in my family.” (His own parents divorced when he was 4.)
But when he and Dana swapped vows on April 11, 1992, he wrote, “somehow I absolutely believed that they were true.”
Will was born two months later, on June 7.
Now an ABC News correspondent, Will told E! that a photo of him (wearing cow ears) on his first birthday with his mom and dad—in which they’re planting a tree outside the family home in Pound Ridge, N.Y.—has had a place of pride next to his bed everywhere he’s ever lived.
Less than two years after that picture was taken, Chris—who initially learned to ride a horse for a 1985 adaptation of Anna Karenina and started competing in 1989— had his accident at the Commonwealth Dressage and Combined Training Association in Culpepper, Va.
“The thing that made me most angry was that I was never reckless,” the Deathtrap actor told the NY Times in 1998. Citing the FAA handbook (he also flew planes), he added, “‘The outcome of any maneuver must never seriously be in doubt.’ That was the rule I lived by in all the sports I did.”
And his family had no choice but to adjust to their new normal.
“The stark difference between before and after the accident is almost too much to bear,” Dana told the NY Times. “I never discuss the accident. I did once, for Chris’ book.”
They also were lucky enough, Chris told the paper, to be able to cover the costs of his care, including his team of “10 nurses, five aides, round the clock.”
Meanwhile, Dana voluntarily put her career on the back burner after becoming a mom, but once her husband went back to work following his accident (earning an Emmy nomination for directing 1997’s In the Gloaming and winning a SAG Award for his performance as the wheelchair-bound amateur sleuth who investigates a murder without leaving his apartment in the 1998 TV remake of Rear Window), so did she.
“We were definitely an acting family,” Dana said in February 2005 on Larry King Live. And Chris “was great in terms of supporting me. He was such an involved dad that when Will had fewer physical needs, where [he] just really needed a ride and a cheering section, Chris was very much able to be there for him.”
While her family still came first, “I am a better person and more able to give by doing something in my career that I find fulfilling,” Dana told Total Theater in 1999 during rehearsals for a production of Enter the Guardsman.
Since the accident, she said, “You get into a different kind of pattern and into a different definition of normal. Although it seems less dramatic or less traumatic than it did, I still don’t take jobs that take me out of town for long periods of time.”
In the fall of 2004, Dana was performing in a production of Brooklyn Boy in Costa Mesa, Calif. and, she told Larry King, flying back to New York for “actors’ weekends,” Sunday to Tuesday.
The Saturday of Oct. 9, 2004, was “a great day” for Chris, she recalled. He had attended Will’s hockey game (his team won), spoke with then-presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry on the phone, talked to Dana (she told him she couldn’t wait to come home) and watched the Yankees play on TV.
But that night, she got off stage and was met with a message to call her husband’s doctor. Chris—who had battled health complications from the time of his accident—was in the hospital after suffering cardiac arrest.
Marsha Garces-Williams, the second wife of Chris’ dear friend Robin Williams quickly got Dana on a private flight back East. Chris was still alive but in a coma when Dana arrived at Northern Westchester Hospital, where he died on Oct. 10.
“Some people have said to me, ‘Do you feel like you got to say goodbye?’” Dana said. “And I feel like for nine-and-a-half years, we had the deathbed conversation. I think you have to live the conversation, and I think we did.”
They talked about death frequently “because we were living a life that was really always on the edge,” she explained. “There was a lot of challenge and a lot of hardship. When you live with a spinal cord injury, there are life-threatening situations on a regular basis. There are a lot of issues that you deal with. And we were not afraid to have big talks.”
While his death at 52 was attributed to heart failure, Dana believed Chris likely had a reaction to one of the drugs he was given in the course of trying to save his life.
“He had a very particular physiognomy that he would react to things that no one reacted to, or he would react to something on the third or fourth dosage, where he had been fine,” she said. “And in this case, that was I think what happened, which precipitated a series of catastrophic events which he just couldn’t come out of.”
The family held a memorial service at the Unitarian Church in Westport, Conn., that Chris and Dana had started attending regularly after his accident. Chris had never been particularly religious, but he appreciated the welcoming congregation, writing in his 2002 book, “Gradually I have come to believe that spirituality is found in the way we live our daily lives. It means spending time thinking about others.”
And Dana was prepared to press on with what had become her husband’s life work as chair of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, raising money for research, funding care programs for people living with paralysis and lobbying Congress for better protections for the disabled community.
She also still hoped to make her Broadway debut, a dream deferred after Chris died.
But in August 2005, Dana shared that she was battling lung cancer. As a nonsmoker, she was “completely shocked” by the diagnosis, she told Entertainment Tonight.
At a fundraiser for their foundation in November 2005, she said her late husband was “a great model” when it came to staying optimistic. “I was married to a man who never gave up.”
So far, she added, “I’m beating the odds and defying every statistic the doctors can throw at me.”
But her condition took a turn and Dana died on March 6, 2006, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 44.
Less than a year beforehand she had told Larry King, “In a way, I think people take sometimes for granted their life and what they have.”
She and Chris, by way of his accident, became “very much aware of what we had and the gifts of life. And that’s one of the ironic hidden gifts behind disability, is that you just realize the gifts that you have are precious.”
All of the above is why theatergoers teared up just watching the trailer for Super/Man, let alone the entire film.
“Of course it sparks a range of emotions, from joyful memories to grief and immense sadness,” Matthew Reeve, whose dad’s framed “S” from his Superman costume now hangs in his own son’s room, told E! News. And to hear his sister and half-brother, for the first time, “tell certain parts of the story from their perspective, challenging is not the right word.”
Will, who was 13 when his mom died, understood the sentiment. “We’re so protective over each other, we’re so close with each other, we love each other so much,” he said, “that there were hard parts there, to see how this shared experience affected each of them in their own ways.”
He added, “Seeing my mom and dad in all their glory brings me back to a happy place, but one that’s tinged with sadness, of course. And I give space and hold weight equally for those things, because that’s part of the human experience.”
Read on for more secrets behind the most successful celebrity marriages:
Mariska Hargitay & Peter Hermann
“I never thought that I would laugh this much in my marriage. That is such a fundamental ingredient of who you are, this insistence on joy,” Hermann detailed to his bride of their partnership of over 20 years in Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue‘s 2020 book What Makes a Marriage Last. “And I think what sustains our marriage is that I know you love me in spite of who I am, and that is the definition of grace.”
Seeking out that happiness is key. Even after a particularly robust argument, “One of us will test the waters with a joke—about the very thing we were fighting about,” Herman shared of life with the Law & Order: SVU star. “It’s like one of us says, ‘I’m not saying I was wrong, and I’m not still insisting I was entirely right, but can we at least inch our way back toward the place where we caught at stuff together?’ Once that happens, it’s a pretty good sign that things are on their way to getting patched up.”
Chip Gaines & Joanna Gaines
They’ve avoided need for any major renovation by sticking to the same advice they got in premarital counseling ahead of their 2003 vows. Even five kids in, Tuesday date nights are a must and they’ve held off on purchasing a TV, instead finding other ways to connect.
But if Chip were to offer any tip to follow, it’d be to pursue the person you love “like a hornet.” Some two decades in, he said, he still feels like the guy hoping to get a second date. “I’m not saying she’d never cheat on me,” he explained, “but it’s not going to be because I never told her I loved her or because I didn’t send her flowers or I forgot our anniversary.”
“My first piece of advice is not to take advice from celebrities,” Bacon joked of his 36-year union. It’s as succinct as their other go-to, “Keep the fights clean and the sex dirty,” a phrase developed specifically to end any further chatter about their marriage.
Truthfully, though, they make it a point not to let arguments linger, rarely digging in for the sake of the victory. “Honestly, we don’t like to fight, so when we actually are in an argument, we’re both looking for a solution,” The Closer actress explained to Thomas and Donahue. “For the most part we’re struggling to get back to everything being okay, because it sucks to fight.” Because, when it comes down to it, she continued, “There is no Plan B. No matter what, we want to work it out.”
Michael J. Fox & Tracy Pollan
Over 37 years into marriage, the actors have mastered the art of fighting fair. “Tracy and I don’t pick scabs,” explained the Family Ties alum. “In some marriages, people look at their partner and see vulnerability and they just can’t help but go after that vulnerability, like it’s a sport or something. We don’t do that.”
That’s not to say they don’t have arguments. “If I’ve said something stupid, I have the tendency to want to take it back and make it all okay,” he said. “But that doesn’t really work.” Instead, he follows her lead and tries to give her space. She, in turn, offers up understanding: “Sometimes you just have to say to yourself, ‘You know what? He said something schmucky and it made me feel bad. But he’s a good person and I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t realize that what he said hurt my feelings.’”
“He still makes me laugh more than any human being,” Curtis said about the Waiting for Guffman director on Today in December 2024, ahead of the couple’s 40th wedding anniversary, adding jokingly, “and I’m sure there’s something about me that he likes. I don’t know what it is, but I’m sure there’s something.”
“I think one of the things that has kept us together all of these years is that we both define relationships as something that’s relatively indefinable,” the How I Met Your Mother alum said. Through 21 years of career shifts (actor-chef Burtka released his cookbook Life Is a Party in 2019), parenting twins Gideon and Harper and dealing with tough times, “Marriage never stays the same,” explained Harris. “When you have sex with the same person over and over, it gets redundant, and so you try different things. Then one day you don’t like each other, and suddenly you’re not attracted to each other, so you have to figure out how to be reattracted to them—but in a different way because you’re aging.”
Eventually, he continued, you find yourself more attracted to their soul. And then their body again. “It all keeps morphing,” he noted. “So in a weird way, we keep falling in love with each other in different ways, over and over.”
Appropriately, the comic actors believe their funniness gives them life. And not just in their 19-year union itself. “Whenever we have a good laugh,” noted the Can You Ever Forgive Me? actress, “especially a crazy one, when you’re like, Oh, my God, and you’re almost dizzy—we always assign it a specific amount of time that it added to our lives. And I’m always adding it up. I’ll say, ‘Okay, that was like two months—I just got two more months to live!’”
They put a time limit on disagreements as well. Citing the oft-repeated don’t go to bed angry rule, Falcone, said, “I tried it once, and I realized that in the morning I had forgotten what I was mad about. You’re not getting any answers if you’re parsing out an argument when everybody is tired and possibly had a drink or two. I’ve never had the thing where you’re having an argument at ten o’clock at night, and then you say, ‘Well, that was good. I’m glad we got to the bottom of that. We agree. Truce signed.’”
Each having wed before they found their way to the other in 1995, they not only had to navigate a marriage, but life as step-parents to two children apiece. “There is no book that tells you how to do it, so the one thing I figured out right away is that they already have a mom—and it’s not me. So what did they need from me?” the Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist actor recalled. “That’s when I realized that everybody needs a cheerleader, right? There’s never too many of those in your life, so that’s what I’ll be. I never set their boundaries, disciplined them, or tried to teach them right from wrong. They have parents who do that.”
The Cheers alum agreed with her stance wholeheartedly. “I think that’s really wise, to offer yourself as a friend,” he said. “‘I’m not going to discipline you and I’m not going to judge you. What I’m going to do is hang out with you and be there for you.’ And that’s what you have to do: absolutely, genuinely be there.”
The moment same-sex civil unions were legalized in Britain, the music icon and the Canadian ad exec were joined together in a Dec. 21, 2005 ceremony. They repeated the process on the exact same day nine years later once they were able to legally wed. And yet the anniversary they recognize is their unexpected meeting during a 1993 weekend dinner party at the singer’s Windsor, England flat, his friend having set the guest list.
Every Saturday, no matter where they are in the world, together or apart, the two pen a handwritten note to each other, by the authors’ count, some 1,352 letters in all. “There’s something very spiritual and real about handwriting,” explains Furnish, “and the cards are a chance to reflect on the week that’s passed and talk about the week that’s coming up.” Agreed the five-time Grammy winner, “It’s part of the success, I think, of a lasting relationship. Communication is the most important thing.”
Having literally Secreted their 40-year marriage into existence (“Six months before I met him, I had these recurring dreams about this person I was going to marry,”) they make sure their union has remained front-and-center even as their entire existence has shifted.
“Marriage is a priority for both of us. And that means that we act on that and refocus when we’ve lost sight of the ball,” she said. If the surgeon could prescribe one piece of advice, it would be to place that bond above all else. “The bottom line is this: I would do anything for her. Climb any mountain, take any bullet—in the chest, too, by the way. I might do things that justifiably make her really angry at me, but I would never let anything block me from delivering my love to her,” he swore.
If you appreciate how valuable marriage is to your long-term happiness, he continued, “You will never let anyone touch it.”
ABC News reporter Roberts isn’t always one for chit-chat. “I don’t like the check-in,” she explaind. “If you’re calling just to say, ‘So, what’s up?’ no, I do not like that.” Everyone’s favorite TV weatherman, however, is a phone guy. And after years of chafing against his frequent calls, a pal proposed something that changed her stance. “
One friend said to me, ‘Did you ever think that maybe he just feels comfortable when he hears your voice, because that tells him that all is right in the world?’” she recounted. “And I thought, ‘That’s very sweet. I’d never thought about it in that way. And if it means something to him, then it should mean something to me.’”
Now, she said, “I have learned to take a breath and say, ‘Sweetie, I’ve got some stuff going on, but what’s going on with you? Great. I’m glad to hear from you. Got to go. Talk to you later. Love you.’ That makes all the difference in the world to him, and it doesn’t kill me for two minutes to be nice and sweet.” They celebrated their 29th anniversary in September 2024.
The building blocks for their nearly 30-year union began back in their newlywed days, when any fight—one involved the Riverdale actor throwing the talk show host’s ring out the window—felt like it could be it. “Early in a marriage, it’s easy to let little things become big things—whether it’s financial strain or career strain or you have kids and you’re sleep-deprived,” espoused the LIVE With Kelly and Ryan star. “But Mark taught me to walk away and take a breath. That’s when you figure out that it’s not a marriage-defining moment.”
Some hard-earned wisdom, to be sure, but now the parents of three are reaping the benefits. “Anytime you see a couple who seems truly happy, you can bet they’ve gone through some crazy, crazy stuff together and they’ve survived,” he stated. “That’s something to be proud of.”
She’s an introvert, she said, “maybe a step away from being a straight-up loner”; he’s the ultimate extrovert “the mayor of everywhere,” as he put it. She’s a touch messy; he’s “a little OCD” noted the Oscar winner. But, wed since 2003, they’ve long since learned to let the other do their thing.
That’s the advice the How to Get Away With Murder lead said she gives to all her soon-to-be-wed friends. “Marriage does not start when you walk down the aisle,” she shared. “Your marriage starts when you look over at a person who you love more than anything, and there’s something about him—just one character trait that makes you say to yourself, ‘Oh man, that’s going to drive me crazy. I don’t know if I can deal with this.’ And then the next minute you say, ‘But you know what? I love him.’ That’s when your marriage starts.”
You don’t reach the 50-year mark in any relationship by letting disagreements drag on. Any time there’s a blowup, noted the Grace and Frankie star, “Usually, I’m the one who apologizes. It’s not hard because I love her and can’t bear for her to feel lonely for even five minutes.”
Even better is when she can avoid saying she’s sorry to the writer altogether. Her top takeaway, she shared, “Remember, when you’re angry at your partner and say something hurtful, you will be more angry at yourself later for having said hurtful things to the person you love. You’ll feel angry twice. Not good for your blood pressure, and certainly not good for your relationship.”
Few things are more on brand than former New York State Supreme Court judge Jerry declaring their decades-long union works because he usually lets the Judge Judy icon win. But for his bride it’s more about knowing you’re not always going to like the final verdict. Their 12-year marriage dissolved in 1990 when he couldn’t be the caretaker she needed following her father’s death. Yet, when they got back together one year later and quickly remarried, she had no delusions that he was suddenly going to be the type to run the household or take the lead on birthday plans.
“Every relationship is different, but there is a common thread of unhappiness, and that unhappiness comes from trying to make another person different from who they are. You can try, but they’re always going to resent it,” she explained matter-of-factly. “I don’t think you should marry anyone with the expectation of changing who they are.”
Daniel Dae Kim & Mia Kim
The Lost alum would be, well, lost without his longtime love, who he married in 1993. As he explained to E! News in April 2025, “My wife—being patient as I traipse around the world, going from job to job—she’s kept our family stable. She’s been fantastic.”
Calling her a “very patient woman,” the actor said his wife and their two sons keeps him “humble no matter what’s happening.”
“They shape my values,” he added. “It’s great to have that perspective and North Star.”
(Originally published Sept. 21, 2024, at 12 a.m. PT)
Source: www.eonline.com