1952–2004 · American actor, director & spinal-cord-injury advocate
Christopher Reeve (25 September 1952 – 10 October 2004) was the American actor who defined Superman on screen across four films, and who in May 1995 was thrown from a horse and left paralysed from the neck down. He spent the nine years that followed as the most visible advocate for spinal-cord-injury research in the world, founding what is now the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and co-founding the Reeve-Irvine Research Center. He wrote two books about that second life — Still Me (1998) and Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life (2002) — and directed for television from a wheelchair. The line about choosing hope is credited to him because it is precisely what he spent a decade arguing, in print and from podiums; the irony is that the version the world memorised is not quite the version he published.