Jane Seymour is paying tribute to her dear friend Christopher Reeve. When asked about the documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story”, which debuted at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21, the actress shared her thoughts.
“He was just an amazing guy. He was bright, he was fearless and he loved to be alone. He loved to fly airplanes and sailboats and ride horses,” Seymour, 73, told about Reeve, whom she was close friends with before his death at age 52 in 2004.
At the event on Thursday, hosted at the offices of Bad Robot in Los Angeles, Seymour also discussed aspects she’s eager for the public to discover about Reeve in the documentary.
“After his terrible accident, the really tough part for him, apart from being unable to move and unable to breathe alone, was that he could never be alone again,” she told about the aftermath of the spinal cord injury Reeve suffered from a May 1995 horseback riding accident that left him paralyzed and dependent on a ventilator. He sadly died from cardiac arrest nine years later.
“It took two people 24/7 just to keep him alive. And I think he didn’t want [his wife Dana Reeve] to have to be the caregiver,” Seymour added.
The former Bond girl continued to express her admiration for her friend, saying,
“I thought he was so amazing” in the sense that “once he’d processed what had happened to him and Dana told him, ‘You’re still you,’ he decided, ‘What can I do to help other people in this situation?'”, referencing Reeve’s 1998 memoir “Still Me.”
“Because there are a lot of people, he said to me, left behind there in rehabs with families disappeared and wives, husbands disappeared, the insurance company disappeared, and they’re just sitting there wishing life away,” Seymour continued.
As she said,
“He took all his energy and all his intellect and all his visibility to move the dial and get the stem-cell thing going when nobody wanted to do that. Now it’s normal.”
“He refused to believe that people with spinal injuries couldn’t recover, and nobody was spending very much money on spinal injuries,” Seymour said. “They just gave up on them, and he just said, ‘No, no. Go do something about it.'”
“And they also did a lot to help that community,” the actress continued, adding that helping others gave Reeve “a purpose.”
“Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” includes intimate interviews with Reeve’s three children Matthew, Alexandra, and Will, as well as his late wife Dana, who passed away in 2006 from lung cancer.
Their children all serve on the board of directors for the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, dedicated to researching a cure for spinal cord injuries.
The documentary also features memories from Reeve’s friends, including Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Daniels, and Glenn Close.