Margot Kidder RIP, A Troubled Soul
OBITUARY
Margot Kidder obituary
Actress who found fame as Lois Lane in the Superman films, but struggled with alcohol and depression
In December 1978 Margot Kidder was booked to fly first class from Los Angeles to London and was looking forward to meeting the Queen at the royal premiere of Superman: The Movie.
Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the film opposite Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent, was on the set of her next movie, The Amityville Horror. She had negotiated time off, but at the last minute the producers came to her with an unforeseen complication. She could not be released “because the flies they were breeding to crawl over Rod Steiger’s face were hatching that day” and her presence was required in the infamously creepy scene.
Missing a royal premiere was, perhaps, a trivial setback, but it was an early augury of what Hollywood came to term “the curse of Superman”. Reeve (obituary, October 12, 2004) was thrown from a horse and paralysed from the neck down, while Kidder suffered a breakdown that hideously matched any Hollywood melodrama.
In an attack of manic paranoia she became convinced that her first husband and the CIA were plotting to kill her. She disappeared and was found by police several days later in a dishevelled state, missing her dental work, with her hair cut off with a razor blade and huddled inside a cardboard box. She had no ID because she had thrown away her handbag, convinced that there was a bomb in it.
After she had recovered she dubbed the episode “the biggest nervous breakdown in history, bar possibly Vivien Leigh’s”, and spoke out about her bipolar disorder and depression to launch a mental wellness campaign. “What’s it like to be the most famous crazy person in the world?” she asked candidly. “It’s a dubious honour. But you take the cards you’re dealt.”
She also dismissed the notion of a curse. “I don’t buy into any of that hogwash. The idea cracks me up. What about the luck of Superman?” she said, referring to a car crash in which she was involved. “If I hadn’t hit a telegraph pole I would have dropped down a 60ft ravine.”
The truth was that, although she was a smart and sassy actress, Kidder’s mental fragility meant that she was not cut out for fame. Reeve, who starred in four Superman films with her, noted that she was “disorganised” and “lacked discipline” from the start, but he added that she had “real charm, warmth and a sense of humour” and regarded her like a sister.
Kidder had grown up believing that film stars were “these perfect glorious people”. Then when she became one she found that she was “still the same schmuck I’d always been” and she struggled to cope.
“After Superman came out I found it very hard to deal with,” she confessed. “There is a sense of having to put on this phoney face in public. I wasn’t very good at it, and it filled me with anxiety and panic. I felt inadequate for the job.”
Yet it had all seemed so different when she arrived in LA in the early 1970s. Known to friends as Margy and living in a rented beach house with the actress and writer Jennifer Salt, their home became a hub where a glittering young set who became known as “the New Hollywood” discussed how they were going to change the industry.
“Our house was full of friends who went on to become influences in the film industry, all connected to each other through us — Brian De Palma, Marty Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Paul Schrader,” Salt said. She recalled Kidder as a “brilliant actress with extraordinary energy and intelligence”.
The men in their circle agreed. Kidder had romantic liaisons with Spielberg, De Palma, Tom Mankiewicz, the Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and Richard Pryor, before she married the novelist Thomas McGuane, with whom she had her only child, Maggie, who became a photographer and a writer.
Kidder found relationships difficult, however. After divorcing McGuane she married the actor John Heard, but the marriage lasted six days. Another marriage, to the French film director Philippe de Broca, was also short-lived.
After her third divorce she claimed that she preferred the companionship of her dogs, but went on to have several high-profile relationships, among them one in the 1980s with the Canadian prime minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau (the father of the country’s present leader, Justin Trudeau). The affair began when he was still in office and she described him as “a wonderful lover” whose death in 2000 left “a big hole” in her heart.
She attributed her litany of celebrity partners to the fact that “being famous is weird, and the only people who get how weird it is are other famous people”.
She joked that her autobiography was going to be called I Slept With Everyone On Television, but writing the book triggered her breakdown. After a computer virus swallowed her first draft, her panic escalated into a manic delusion that it was part of a plot to kill her.
She was born Margaret Ruth Kidder in 1948 in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Canada, where her father, Kendall Kidder, was a mining engineer, and her mother, Jill (née Wilson), was a history teacher.
Her father’s job meant that the family were always on the move. One of five children, she attended 11 schools in as many years before she was sent to boarding school.
When her mother took her to New York to see the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie at the age of 12 she wrote in her diary that she wanted to become a movie star. She also noted that she had a problem to overcome first. She called it “keeping the monsters at bay” and even at that early age she was aware that her mood swings — the severity of which she said could “knock over entire cities” — was abnormal. She tried to kill herself for the first time at the age of 14 after a boyfriend dumped her.
After moving to California she enthusiastically embraced the hippy lifestyle and posed nude for Playboy. “We all believed in ‘make love not war’,” she said. “We were idealistic innocents, despite the drugs and sex. We were sweet, lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions that placed money and wars above all else.”
Kidder’s liberal instincts remained strong all her life. She lived in the US for three decades on a Canadian passport, but finally applied for American citizenship so she could vote against George W Bush.
She played opposite Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and in the same year with Peter Fonda in 92 in the Shade, which was directed by McGuane, whom she promptly married. Yet by the time Superman came along her husband had persuaded her to “retire” to raise their daughter on a ranch away from the bright lights.
She hated the isolation and, determined to get back to work, rang an agent, who pointed her in the direction of Richard Donner, who was casting for the first of the Superman films in 1978. She had never read a comic book and knew nothing about the superhero, but landed the part of Lois Lane. It was the end of life on the ranch — and of her first marriage. “Thomas wanted me to be a subservient writer’s wife, which was never going to happen,” she noted tartly.
The Superman movies and the success of The Amityville Horror in 1979 made her a highly bankable proposition. Yet gradually the lead roles began to dry up as she acquired a reputation for being difficult on set. She went to great lengths to hide her illness. Few were aware of her struggles.
A car crash in the early 1990s left her in a wheelchair for a prolonged period and further stalled her career, while medical bills plunged her into bankruptcy. Turning to the bottle did not help either. “If I felt myself starting to go manic I’d get drunk,” she said. “Better drunk than crazy.”
After her breakdown she joined a 12-step group and refused any more prescription drugs, relying on acupuncture and other alternative remedies. She also concluded that LA was toxic and moved to Montana, living in a log cabin in the foothills of a mountain range called, much to her amusement, the Crazies.
She referred to her life before and after the breakdown as “pre-cuckoo” and “post-cuckoo”. However, despite the problems that at times overwhelmed her, she believed that, overall, the balance sheet of her life was strongly in credit. “The reality has been grand and wonderful,” she said. “Punctuated by these odd blips and burps of madness.”
Margot Kidder, actress, was born on October 17, 1948. She died of undisclosed causes on May 13, 2018, aged 69
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