Supporting Role Thrust Her to Fame

Away from the spotlight that their celebrity brought to the cause of spinal research, Dana and Christopher Reeve took a less-glamorous path through the corridors of power.

“We spend our lives going through kitchens and riding on freight elevators,” Dana Reeve once recalled of the near decade that she and her paralyzed actor husband spent tirelessly lobbying for stem cell research, a potential treatment for paralysis.

The actress’ real-life role as the graceful and devoted caregiver of her husband, who became a paraplegic three years into their marriage, brought her worldwide fame that she found puzzling.

She was no saint, she said, but a woman simply in love. “Of course I’m doing this,” she once said. “What other option is there?”

Dana Reeve, a nonsmoker diagnosed with lung cancer within months of the death of her husband in 2004, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said Kathy Lewis, president of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which funds research on paralysis. Reeve was 44.

After Reeve’s husband died, she succeeded him as president of the New Jersey-based foundation. To date, it has awarded $55 million in neuroscience research grants and given almost $8 million to projects that strive to improve the quality of life of those with paralysis. Formerly known as the American Paralysis Assn., it was renamed for the actor in 1999.

Anybody would have “turned cartwheels for Dana Reeve -- she was just one very special woman,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who knew Dana as the “smiling, beautiful woman” who stood behind her husband’s wheelchair as he testified on Capitol Hill.

“I thought that after everything she had gone through with Chris that she would have time to smell the flowers and be in the sun. But apparently that was not meant to be,” said Feinstein, giving voice to the thoughts of many stunned by the early death of a woman who stepped away from her career when her family needed her.

Before her death, Reeve made arrangements for the couple’s 13-year-old son, Will, to live with a family near the Reeve home in Bedford, N.Y., so he could maintain existing friendships, according to a report by Fox News. Will, who lost both parents within 17 months, is reportedly close to the family’s son.

Reeve is also survived by two grown stepchildren, her father and two sisters.

The hardest part of the diagnosis, she said, was telling her son.

“He was very young when Chris had his accident, and in a way it was almost easier because, well, partly, it wasn’t me,” she told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in November. “I’ve always been his rock, and just following so quickly on the heels of his father’s death and my mother’s death.... It has been a very rough year on our family.”

Her mother died of ovarian cancer in February 2005. Four months earlier, her husband, best known for starring in a quartet of “Superman” films, died of complications resulting from the spinal-cord injury he suffered in a 1995 horse-riding accident.

When Reeve announced her lung cancer diagnosis in August two days after ABC News anchor Peters Jennings -- a smoker -- died of the disease, it was startling. Yet doctors say one in five women diagnosed with the disease has never smoked a cigarette.

More women die of lung cancer each year -- 65,000 -- than any other type of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

Asked how she kept her spirits up, Reeve said she “had a great role model. I was married to a man who never gave up.”

As recently as Jan. 12, Reeve looked healthy as she belted out Carole King’s “Now and Forever” at a packed Madison Square Garden during a retirement ceremony honoring a close friend, New York Rangers hockey star Mark Messier.

Four months ago at a fundraising gala for the foundation, Reeve said she was responding well to treatment.

In a long formal gown, she provoked teasing wolf whistles from actor Robin Williams, who met Christopher Reeve at the Juilliard School and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to help pay for his care.

“The brightest light has gone out. We will forever celebrate her loving spirit,” Williams and his wife, Marsha, said in a statement.

Actor Paul Newman, a close friend of the family, said in a statement, “She was vibrant. She was stylish. She was caring, and she will be sorely missed.”

In his 1998 autobiography, “Still Me,” Christopher Reeve wrote that after the accident he suggested to his wife, then in her early 30s, “Maybe you should let me go.” She responded, “I’ll be with you for the long haul, no matter what. You’re still you and I love you.”

Those were the words, Christopher Reeve said, “that saved my life.”

During his nine years in a wheelchair, she was her husband’s constant companion.

In 1999, she put together what she called a long-overdue “thank-you letter” to those who had sent words of encouragement after her husband’s accident; they received 35,000 pieces of mail in the first three weeks. The book “Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve From Strangers and Friends” was also, she said, a love letter to her husband.

Dana Morosini was born March 17, 1961, in Teaneck, N.J. The daughter of Charles, a cardiologist, and his wife, Helen, she grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y. She graduated with a degree in English from Middlebury College in Vermont and spent her junior year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

She met Reeve, who was already a movie star, in 1987 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where she was appearing in a cabaret. As she was singing “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” he strolled into the room.

Six months later they were living together. In 1992, they were married and their son was born.

“By the time of Chris’ accident, I’d established myself firmly, making a nice income doing commercials and an occasional limited-run play. And I’d realized I didn’t want to be doing that with my life,” Reeve told Newsday in 1997.

After taking two college courses in child development, she began to investigate doctoral programs and planned to move out of performing when her husband’s horse balked at a jump during a competition. Thrown from his horse, his spinal cord was damaged and he nearly died. He was left paralyzed from the neck down.

Except for the year she took off after the accident, Dana Reeve continued to act, mainly appearing in episodes of television series and, occasionally, onstage. She made her Broadway debut in 1998 in the short-lived “More to Love: A Big Fat Comedy.”

She was performing in the Broadway-bound “Brooklyn Boy” at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa in October 2004 when she rushed home to be at her dying husband’s side after he went into cardiac arrest and a coma.

Reeve said she had promised her son she would keep her acting roles to a minimum, but after she was widowed, she vowed to return to her career.

“I am an actress and I do have to make a living,” she said.

Recently, Reeve taped a PBS show, “The New Medicine,” scheduled for broadcast March 29, about how doctors are paying more attention to a patient’s cultural values and lifestyle as part of treatment.

Several months before her husband died, the couple gave the 2004 commencement address at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Some of the choices in life “will choose you,” she said. “How you face these choices, these turns in the road, with what kind of attitude, more than the choices themselves, is what will define the context of your life.”