Dana Reeve: 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 paralysed actor husband spent tirelessly lobbying for stem-cell research, a potential treatment for paralysis.
The actress's real-life role as the graceful and devoted carer 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.
Dana Reeve, a non-smoker diagnosed with lung cancer within months of the death of her husband in 2004, died on Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Centre in New York.
After her husband died, she succeeded him as president of the New Jersey-based Christopher Reeve Foundation, which funds research on paralysis. 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 Association, it was renamed for the actor in 1999.
Before her death, Dana made arrangements for the couple's 13-year-old son, Will, to live with a family near the Reeve home in Bedford, New York, so he could maintain existing friendships, according to a one report. She is also survived by two grown stepchildren, her father and two sisters.
In 2004 Christopher Reeve, best known for starring in four Superman films, died of complications resulting from the spinal-cord injury he suffered in a 1995 horse-riding accident.
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 on March 17th, 1961, in Teaneck, New Jersey. The daughter of Charles, a cardiologist, and his wife, Helen, she grew up in Scarsdale, New York. 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. In 1992 they were married and their son was born. "By the time of Chris's accident, I'd established myself firmly, making a nice income doing commercials and an occasional limited-run play. And I'd realised I didn't want to be doing that with my life," Dana Reeve told Newsday in 1997.
After taking two college courses in child development, she began to investigate doctoral programmes and planned to move out of performing when her husband's thoroughbred baulked at a jump during a dressage competition. Thrown from his horse, he was left paralysed from the neck down and nearly died.
Except for the year she took off after the accident, she 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, California, in 2004 when she rushed home to be at her dying husband's side after he went into cardiac arrest and a coma. She 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.
Asked how she kept her spirits up after her own diagnosis, Dana Reeve once said she "had a great role model. I was married to a man who never gave up."
Dana Reeve: born March 17th, 1961; died March 6th, 2006.