REAL-LIFE SUPERHERO:
Lois Lane star gave a rare insight into her struggle with mental ill-health during an interview with PAUL ENGLISH 20 months before her death this week
NOTEPAD in hand, she burst into the editor’s office demanding to write a story on murders in Metropolis. It was her first scene in the film that went on to define her career. Yet in real life, Margot Kidder’s advocacy and campaigning offered hope and comfort well beyond anything even fearless reporter Lois Lane could muster. Like many a child back then, I was in thrall to Margot’s Lois in the Superman movies of the 70s and 80s. A tough cookie holding her own in a man’s world, she was independent, intrepid and fearless, like Carrie Fisher in Star Wars and Karen Allen in Indiana Jones. As an eight-year-old who used to jump off the couch in a plastic red cape, Lois was, to me, the perfect woman. But away from her battles with criminal masterminds and alien terrorists, Margot was fighting a battle which would mean much more to me and countless others. In 1996, it was revealed she had been suffering from manic depression, as it was then known, bipolar disorder as it’s more commonly known now. Someone close to me had been given the same diagnosis not long before. In a world where mental illness was not discussed, this distant resonance felt like a crack opening in a bolted door. There were other people dealing with this, even if they were in Hollywood. Five years later, I caught the tail end of a radio interview in the car. Margot was talking about the fight for mental wellness. I was determined to amplify her message and pursued a phone interview in which she talked candidly about her quest for balance, using “orthomolecular” medication as part of a holistic approach. In a world far away from mine, where even in 2002 talk of mental illness, its ravaging progress and devastating impacts were routinely met with the awkward silence of a dirty little secret, we both knew the importance of speaking about something few people discussed.
That I was doing it with someone I’d grown up watching falling out of helicopters and being swallowed up by earthquakes in a Hollywood blockbuster about an all-American hero in blue tights mattered little.
Despite her demons, Margot kept working, albeit never at the same heights as when she was Lois to Christopher Reeve Superman in four films between 1978 and 1987.
She worked in theatre in New York, had a cameo in Smallville, the TV origins story of Superman, and won an Emmy for a Canadian children’s TV series.
Margot also campaigned on environmental issues, women’s rights and mental health.
She was arrested at a peace protest at the White House and even turned real-life journalist, exposing a dodgy funding mechanism in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
In 2016, Margot came to Glasgow for a movie fan convention, making time for a journalist whose agenda was two-fold.
Asking about the films was an easy indulgence. Asking about how she survived the pitch and toss of mental ill-health was much more important. “For years before, I so desperately wanted to be a movie star because my sense of self was so fragile,” she told me. “I thought that becoming a movie star would change me into someone wonderful rather than just another shmuck. When I got my first diagnosis around my late teens and early 20s, it was schizophrenia. And I said, ‘No. No, absolutely not. “But I knew from 13 or 14 that there was a part of myself I couldn’t show people because they’d know I was crazy. I didn’t want to be crazy but the big effort was hiding it. “When I had episodes, I had to be smart about them and keep them hidden, except from the handful of people who knew. I didn’t like the idea of schizophrenia.” Margot was suspicious of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies but said: “I’s really important people don’t just stop taking their medication. “I went through years when I didn’t take any, then I got sloppy and relapsed. Margot looked back at her acute episodes as “the most extraordinary adventures I ever had.” She said: “That one (when she made headlines after being found in a suburban back yard in Los Angeles in 1996) was the most dramatic.
“I had others that weren’t public and they were all pretty weird but that one made me learn about the brain. “Marlon Brando (her Superman co-star) was the first person who came to see me in the bin.
“Everything was a l earnin g experience. It was mindboggling to realise my brain could do what it did.
“I went right into the eye of a hurricane I was fleeing since I was 12 and I came out alive, better, stronger.
“I got rid of a lot of the dark pus of the centre, married the inside and the outside and I learned.”
Margot, who died on Sunday at the age of 69, added: “It was a huge thing to go through and I don’t regret it.
“I became a figure of hope but after a while I started to pull back on the speeches and advocacy.
“I never wanted to just be known as Lois Lane but I also didn’t want to be known as the actress who went crazy for a while and who you can now hire to talk about it.
“So I decided to keep going and see how long we can last, keep having adventures.
“I’ve been blessed with a great sense of curiosity and I never wanted life to be just one thing.”
As we said our goodbyes in a Renfrewshire hotel, she told me she was writing her autobiography.
“It has been a fun movie,” she said, laughing.
Margot passed on her good wishes for the person close to me whose mental health is still a daily struggle.
She left me – the man who fell for Lois Lane – in no doubt that Margot Kidder was the everyday embodiment of a hero. ●For information about mental health, contact the Scottish Association for Mental Health at samh.org.uk. For info about Mental Health Awareness Week, visit mentalhealth.org.uk