When Superman debuted in cinemas in 1978, she and Christopher Reeve took to the skies with their heroines in nightgowns, capturing the hearts of audiences around the world and the history of film.
Actress Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane – an assortment of journalistic feistiness and besotted comic book-girlfriend vulnerability – became immediately iconic and recognizable.
The world couldn’t get enough of the ethereal Canadian beauty, who starred in four of the franchise’s blockbusters and appeared on the covers of numerous magazines and in TV interviews without shoes.
As legions of fanatics envied her aerial on-screen adventures with one of Hollywood’s then-hottest heartthrobs, however, Kidder was wrestling with a lifetime of what she dubbed ‘mind flights.’
She would only come to accept a bipolar diagnosis later in life, but Kidder, from childhood, was plagued by mental struggles that would at one point in the 1990s leave her homeless and near toothless in California, committed to psychiatric care and searching through garbage for food.
Kidder later marked the painful episode ‘the most public freak-out in history,’ telling People in 1996 that she’d been ‘like one of those ladies you see talking to the space aliens on the street corner in New York.’
She would later become a passionate mental health advocate – by opposing conventional medicines. And Kidder would continue to endure a string of highs and lows before her May 2018 death, ruled a suicide after a friend found her body in tiny Livingston, Montana – where she’d lived for years and was reportedly trying to support drug addicts at the time of her demise.
‘It’s a big relief that the truth is out there,’ Kidder’s only child, Maggie, said after the coroner ruled three months later that the actress had died ‘as a result of a self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose’.
‘It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this,’ her daughter added.
While many have attributed Kidder’s downfall to the ‘Superman curse’ – with her costar, Reeve, left paralyzed by a horsing accident before he died in 2004 – Kidder herself had been open and frank for decades about her struggles.
‘The reality of my life has been grand and wonderful, punctuated by these odd blips and burps of madness,’ she told People.
She grew up in about a dozen towns in Canada’s northwest provinces, one of five children born to a Canadian mother and an American father who moved often for work. From an early age, she said, she knew her brain saw life differently.
‘I’ve always called it “keeping the monsters in,”’ she told People. ‘I knew it wasn’t socially acceptable at a high school dance to talk about the time you got homogenized with pine cones.’
Her first suicide attempt was at 14 after a boyfriend dumped her.
‘It never occurred to anyone to send me to a shrink,’ she told the outlet. ‘I was just a teenager with a broken heart.’
She was attracted to performance, though ‘Nobody ever encouraged me to be an actress,’ Kidder told Rolling Stone. ‘It was taken as a joke. I just knew I didn’t want to stay in a small town, get married and have babies … I wanted to eat everything on the world’s platter, but my eyes were bigger than my stomach.’
After a year at university, Kidder decided to satisfy her passion and set off for Toronto, finding acting work in Canada and earning a name before moving to Los Angeles to star with James Garner in the 1971 TV series Nichols.
She continued to work steadily, landing roles that included the film adaptation of writer Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two in Shade. The married novelist directed it himself and cast Kidder to play his female lead; despite his wife and mistress, the pair struck up a romance.
He got divorced, Kidder moved to Montana and they welcomed daughter Maggie in 1975, marrying the following year.
‘I decided, for the first time in my life, I was going to commit to a man, be a wife and mother,’ she told Rolling Stone. ‘It was the only relationship in which I said, “I’m going all the way, even if it means my own self-destruction.”
‘But I didn’t really commit – it was sort of half-assed. I mostly sat around and wept in closets. It was a great lesson.’
Kidder quickly tired of her rural life and missed acting; she called up LA agent Rick Nicita out of the blue while still living in Montana.
‘She said, “I’m coming back to the business, and I want you to be my agent okay?”’ he told Rolling Stone.
‘I said, “I think we ought to meet and talk about it; we hardly know each other.’ And she said, “Hey, let’s just do it.” So I had her fly in and sign agency contracts.’
She landed Superman after sparking unmistakable chemistry with Reeve, though she admitted later she’d found him ‘dorky’ upon meeting. The role catapulted her to fame – and released her from marriage, with she and McGuane divorcing – but stardom came at a cost.
‘I was being what I call “Margot Moviestar,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. ‘Or trying to be, very badly. After Superman came out, I found it very difficult and hard to deal with.
‘There is a sense of having to put on this phoney face when you go out in public. I wasn’t very good at it, and it filled me with anxiety and panic.’
She partied wildly, dated a series of high-profile names – from Pierre Trudeau to Richard Pryor – and generally earned a reputation for being erratic, charismatic and eccentric.
‘I’ve never done anything in moderation in my life,’ she told Rolling Stone in 1981. ‘I’ve always been addicted to excess. I mean, this whole concept of moderation is something I yearn for.’
She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1988 but refused to accept it nor take the recommended treatment of lithium.
‘It’s very hard to convince a manic person that there is anything wrong with them,’ she told People. ‘You have no desire to sleep. You are full of ideas.’
A car accident injury in 1990, sustained while filming in Vancouver, threw another twist in Kidder’s life and mental health. However, left partly paralyzed, she had surgery two years later – but the damage and recovery left her bankrupt, as well as addicted to pills and alcohol.
‘Nothing was ever stable for Maggie. Manics run through a lot of money, so there was no financial security,’ she told People.
At the same time, in less than ten years, Kidder married and divorced three times – including a six-day union with actor John Heard.
‘I was whipping through husbands a mile a minute,’ she told the magazine.
She was unattached and writing her memoirs in 1996 when a manic episode catapulted her back into the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Her computer crashed, she lost her work and ‘went from really distressed to absolute delusion,’ she told People.
She flew to LA to see a computer specialist who couldn’t help and, while waiting for her return flight at the airport, told the magazine that she became convinced her ex-husband and the CIA were ‘trying to kill her’ and screamed ‘I know you’re looking at me!’ at passersby.
Increasingly irrational and paranoid, Kidder threw away her purse, ‘took off running’ and made it 20 miles downtown, sleeping ‘in yards and on porches in a state of fear’ and hacking off most of her hair.
She turned up days later, filthy and dishevelled and in what police called ‘obvious mental distress,’ in the backyard of a Glendale homeowner who called 911.
After a short hospitalization, the actress gave a high-profile interview to Barbara Walters and discussed her bipolar diagnosis, then turned to mental health advocacy and even pro-choice activism.
‘If I were to go into the real facts about the five days I was wandering around LA, you’d have to write a book,’ she told the LA Times in the year after the episode.
‘Because when one is manic, one of the things that happens is the brain is speeding at such a rate that the messages going from the neuron across the synapse are going so quickly because your brain floods with something called dopamine. Every part of your mind is on red alert, so you are remembering everything you’ve ever read and everything that’s happened in your life, and you’re speeding so quickly, so within those five days I lived five years.’
Endeavouring to rectify some reports, she said: ‘I wasn’t cowering with a knife or anything, I was sleeping in this woman’s leaf pile in her backyard when she came out to do her gardening, and I didn’t want to frighten her, so I said, “Hi, excuse me, hello, I’m in trouble.’”
She returned to Montana and, by 2005, was describing herself as ‘a grandmother with my dogs and nice friends here in the Rocky mountains.
‘Ever see the movie A River Runs Through It? That’s where I live,’ she told The Guardian. ‘It’s beautiful, no two ways about it.’
She was still, however, eschewing conventional therapies for her mental health problems.
‘You take the cards you’re dealt, and I got better,’ she said. ‘I’m now ferociously healthy in body and mind. You couldn’t pay me to go near a psychiatrist again. Stopping seeing them was my first step to getting well.’
Kidder was a vocal supporter of orthomolecular medicine – an alternative medicine focused on balancing vitamins and nutrients to support health without drugs – and even narrated a documentary about the approach.
Her final years, however, appeared marked by further struggles.
The actress-cum-activist’s home in Livingston, Montana, was taken over by meth-heads who she was trying to ‘fix’, close friends told Daily Mail in the immediate aftermath of her demise.
Between August 2016 and her death in May 2018, officers were summoned to her home 40 times on reports of people trespassing, theft and other disturbances, according to police records released under a public records request.
The calls include responses by ambulances five times in seven months, including at the time of her death.
Drug addicts ended up cooking methamphetamine in her basement and stealing her valuables, they added.
‘Margie was a real bad judge of people,’ environmental activist Louisa Willox said, using the name that the Superman star was universally known by around the town, which has attracted dozens of counter-culture characters over the years.
‘Towards the end, I went round to help her with her medications and I couldn’t read the instructions on the bottle because the ink had run.
‘She told me that was because she had to hide the pills in her bra to stop these guys stealing them.’
Kidder was discovered dead in her home in Livingston on May 13, 2018, at the age of 69.
‘It’s a very unique sort of grief and pain,’ her daughter told the Associated Press that month. Knowing how many families in this state [Montana] go through this, I wish that I could reach out to each one of them.’
It’s a feeling her mother, so vocal about addressing mental health, regardless of the means, would probably have greatly appreciated.
Kidder had been aware of her struggle to balance passion and stability for as far back as she could remember – but her appreciation for life radiated through in so much of what she did and said.
In the early days of her international fame, in the wake of the Superman box office behemoth, she described to Rolling Stone ‘a constant sense of conflict: if I think about what I believe is important, I’ll be crazy; and if I don’t think about it, I find myself denying, denying, denying in order to be normal.’
Her daughter, seven months after Kidder’s death on Mother’s Day in 2018, was reflective as she spoke to The New York Times. She thought about her mother’s ups and downs, her highs and lows, her private and public personas and her legacy.
‘What made her even more extraordinary than people understand is that she did all that she did while fighting those battles,’ Maggie said.
The fact is that mental illness is terrible, but it’s still not classed as essential as physical health.
She had her struggles, but for those who remember ‘Superman’, she will always be the original ‘Lois Lane.’
She was such a natural beauty, and she was brilliant in ‘Superman’. She was the typical girl next door and I’m sure numerous girls wanted to be her.
Superman, all three of them were great movies of their time. They were just magic. Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder were meant for the part. The movie was funny but not goofy or juvenile, and that was the secret.
Margot Kidder is still and will always be the definitive ‘Louis Lane’ and she was the ideal foil to Reeve. Brando, Hackman, Ford and Stamp all give the movie gravitas and the effects were groundbreaking for the time, and then, of course, you have that extraordinary score by John Williams.
Welcome to Hollywood where some dreams come true and some don’t!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 