Canadian Superman actress Margot Kidder dies at age 69
LIVINGSTON, MONT. — Margot Kidder, who starred as Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in the Superman film franchise of the late 1970s and early 1980s, has died.
Franzen-Davis Funeral Home in Livingston, Mont., posted a notice on its website saying Kidder died Sunday at her home there. She was 69.
Superman was a superhero blockbuster two decades before comic book movies became the norm at the top of the box office.
Both Kidder and Reeve, who played Superman, were relative unknowns when they got their leading parts, and neither saw many major roles afterward. Reeve died in 2004.
The Canadian-born Kidder also appeared in 1975’s The Great Waldo Pepper with Robert Redford and 1978’s The Amityville Horror.
She went on to become an advocate for mental-health issues after speaking out about living with bipolar disorder.
She was a political activist in recent years and was among a group of environmentalists to be arrested outside the White House in 2011 during a protest against TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.
Kidder, who became an American citizen, had settled in Montana to live in a “culture-free zone” away from the spotlight and close to her daughter and grandchildren.
The Toronto Star’s Richard Ouzounian wrote in 2010 that even though she was on the way to her so-called golden years, she still radiated enough energy to light up a room.
She was starring in a show called Love, Loss and What I Wore, written by Nora and Delia Ephron, while in Toronto.
“One of the things when you pass 60 is that your life gets to be about a series of losses that mount like a funeral pyre,” she said at the time. “You develop a hyperawareness that you’re in the last stretch. It’s very liberating and very empowering in some ways, but it’s also bittersweet. It’s a very Buddhist place you have to get into if you’re going to cope with all of it.”
Born in Yellowknife in 1948, she grew up in what she calls “a fiercely political household. It didn’t matter what side you took, but you had to be up on every issue and prepared to defend what you believed in.”
She scored the coveted role of Superman’s paramour Lane in 1976 after a lucky call earned her a screen test.
“I’d never read comics, so I didn’t know much about Superman,” she said in 2009. “But I read this very funny script, and I went in and did a couple scenes, and next thing I knew, I was being flown to England to screentest, and that was that.”
Kidder has said signing on to the film also marked the end of her first marriage to novelist Thomas McGuane, the father of her only child, daughter Maggie, as he wanted her to be a “subservient writer’s wife.”
Kidder also famously dated Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau.
The Superman franchise shot her to international fame — something she later called “the weirdest thing in the world.”
“I still get stopped for being Lois Lane, and I’m 60 and have two grandchildren,” she told The AV Club. “So it’s kind of weird.”
Kidder and Reeve reprised their roles as the famous duo three more times, in 1980’s Superman II, 1983’s Superman III, and 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.