Actress best known for her role as Lois Lane in Superman

Margot Kidder, who has Margot

died aged 69, was best Kidder

known for her role as the 1948-2018

ambitious, tough-talking reporter Lois Lane in Superman, said The Guardian. She and Christopher Reeve brought a “screwball vivacity” to the four films in the series, and thanks to her “sassy performance” Lois was never just the love interest, or the damsel in distress. Her Lois was “nobody’s fool”, despite her startling inability, required by the narrative, “to spot that only a pair of glasses and a spandex bodysuit distinguished Clark Kent from Superman”.

Born in Canada in 1948, Kidder was the daughter of an explosives expert whose job took the family from place to place: she attended 11 schools in 12 years, and suffered severe mood swings as a teenager. She decided she wanted to be in movies aged 12, and by the early 1970s, she was getting roles in Hollywood films and living in a house in Malibu that served as a hang-out for the likes of Peter Fonda, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma (whom she dated). In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind wrote: “She broke hearts and sued producers… and struck her friends as not altogether stable.” Her role in Superman made her famous: it was the second biggest film of 1978, after Grease. But to her regret, she missed the royal premiere in London because she was by then working on her next film, The Amityville Horror. They “couldn’t release me because the flies they were breeding to crawl over Rod Steiger’s face were hatching that day”.

The last Superman film, The Quest for Peace, came out in 1987 – and was generally considered a disaster. After that, the roles started to dry up. In 1990, she was injured in a car crash, and fell into debt. Then in 1996 she suffered a severe bipolar episode and spent three days living rough in LA, before being found in a stranger’s garden. The incident garnered considerable publicity, and after her recovery, she helped to raise awareness of mental health issues, while also campaigning on behalf of various environmental causes. She was married three times, and in the 1980s had a well-publicised affair with Pierre Trudeau, the then Canadian PM. She is survived by her daughter, Maggie.