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CHRISTOPHER REEVE TO BE WILLIAMS COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.--Actor Christopher Reeve (47), who has continued to work despite physical paralysis, will give the main address at Williams College's 210th Commencement on Sunday, June 6, 1999.
Reeve, a superb athlete, did his own stunts in films and was an avid outdoorsman, but a 1995 equestrian accident, when he was thrown and broke his neck, left him quadriplegic.
He has became a national spokesman for the disabled and for spinal cord research that may someday help him and 250,000 paralyzed Americans regain movement.
He brought that message to the 1996 Democratic National Convention: "The message must go forward that just as it was thought impossible to cure polio or TB or perform triple-bypass surgery or put a man on the moon, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished in the brain or in the central nervous system, if we have the will and the determination to do so."
Reeve has led the push for legislation that would raise the limit on catastrophic injury health coverage and worked tirelessly as chair of the American Paralysis Association and vice chairman of the National Organization on Disability.
He also continues his work in theatre. Breathing with the help of a ventilator, which inflates his lungs, Reeve directed the television film In the Gloaming, starring Glenn Close and Whoopie Goldberg and starred in ABC's recent remake of the 1954 film thriller Rear Window for which he won the 1999 Screen Actors' Guild Award for Best Actor. "Sitting around doing nothing," he told The New York Times, "isn't for me."
Reeve traces his love of acting back to his early years when he and his younger brother would make believe: "The ability to retain at least some of this childhood innocence is essential for an actor," he said.
Beginning at age eight, he appeared in school plays, and in 1968 at age 15 he got a summer apprenticeship at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF). He has appeared in more than 20 feature films, a dozen TV-movies, and about 75 plays. No matter what he was doing at the time, he invariably made every effort to spend summers at WTF. As a student at Cornell University, where he majored in music theory and English, he worked simultaneously as a professional actor. He received his B.A. from Cornell in 1974. In lieu of his final year at Cornell, Reeve was one of two students accepted to advanced standing at New York's Juilliard School of Performing Arts, where he studied under John Houseman.
After Juilliard, he was Ben Harper in the long-running television serial Love of Life, but found time to audition and win a coveted role in A Matter of Gravity, a new play slated for Broadway in 1976, starring Katharine Hepburn. In 1978 he successfully screen tested for Superman, his best known film role. His Williamstown Theatre Festival appearances include major roles in Summer and Smoke, Holiday, The Guardsmen, and Death Takes a Holiday. His TV appearances include Anna Karenina, The Rose and the Jackal and Above Suspicion. He is the author of Still Me in which he tells the story of his life. His audio recording of the book won a 1999 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word.
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