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http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1011medicare11.html
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Christopher Reeve, the star of the Superman movies whose nearly fatal
riding accident nine years ago turned him into a worldwide advocate
for spinal cord research, died Sunday of heart failure, his publicist
said. He was 52.
Reeve fell into a coma Saturday after going into cardiac arrest while
at his New York home, his publicist, Wesley Combs, told the Associated
Press on Sunday night by phone from Washington, D.C.
Reeve was being treated at Northern Westchester Hospital for a
pressure wound, a common complication for people living with
paralysis. advertisement
In the past week, the wound had become severely infected, resulting in
a serious systemic infection.
"On behalf of my entire family, I want to thank Northern Westchester
Hospital for the excellent care they provided to my husband," Dana
Reeve, Christopher's wife, said in a statement. "I also want to thank
his personal staff of nurses and aides, as well as the millions of
fans from around the world who have supported and loved my husband
over the years."
Reeve broke his neck in May 1995 when he was thrown from his horse
during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Va.
Enduring months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and
longer periods without a respirator, Reeve emerged to lobby Congress
for better insurance protection against catastrophic injury and to
move an Academy Award audience to tears with a call for more films
about social issues.
He returned to directing, and even returned to acting in a 1998
production of Rear Window, a modern update of the Hitchcock thriller
about a man in a wheelchair who becomes convinced a neighbor has been
murdered. Reeve won a Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor in a
Television Movie or Miniseries.
In his public appearances, Reeve was as handsome as ever, his blue
eyes bright and his voice clear.
In 2000, Reeve was able to move his index finger, and a workout
regimen had made his legs and arms stronger. He also had regained
sensation in other parts of his body. Reeve's support of stem cell
research helped it emerge as a major campaign issue between President
Bush and John Kerry. His name was even mentioned by Kerry Friday
during the second presidential debate.
His athletic, 6-foot-4-inch frame and love of adventure made him a
natural, if largely unknown, choice for the title role in the first
Superman movie in 1978. He insisted on performing his own stunts.
Though he owed his fame to it, Reeve made a concerted effort to, as he
put it, "escape the cape." He played a crippled Vietnam veteran in the
1980 Broadway play Fifth of July, a lovestruck time-traveler in the
1980 movie Somewhere in Time, and an aspiring playwright in the 1982
suspense thriller Deathtrap.
Yet Reeve always will be known to movie fans as the strapping,
boyishly handsome stage veteran whose charm and humor brought a new
dimension to the characters of Superman and his alter-ego, Clark Kent.
The film co-starred Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.
Reeve was born Sept. 25, 1952, in New York City, son of a novelist and
a newspaper reporter. Active in many sports, Reeve owned several
horses and competed in equestrian events regularly. Witnesses to the
May 1995 accident said Reeve's horse had cleared two of 15 fences
during the jumping event and stopped abruptly at the third, flinging
the actor headlong to the ground.
Doctors said he fractured the top two vertebrae in his neck and
damaged his spinal cord. While filming Superman in London, Reeve met
modeling agency co-founder Gae Exton, and the two began a relationship
that lasted several years. The couple had two sons, but were never
wed.
Reeve later married Dana Morosini; they had one son, Will, 11. His
wife became his frequent spokeswoman after the accident.
A few months after the accident, he told interviewer Barbara Walters
that he considered suicide in the first dark days after he was
injured. But he quickly overcame such thoughts when he saw his
children.
"I could see how much they needed me and wanted me ... and how lucky
we all are and that my brain is on straight."
No plans for a funeral were immediately announced.
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