Dana Reeve

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Dana Reeve (March 17, 1961 – March 6, 2006) was an American actress, singer, and activist for disability causes. She was also the wife of actor Christopher Reeve.

Early life and family

Reeve was born Dana Charles Morosini in Teaneck, New Jersey to Charles Morosini, a cardiologist, and Helen Simpson Morosini, who died in 2005.^[1]

She grew up in the town of Greenburgh, New York, where she graduated from Edgemont High School in 1979.^[2] She graduated cum laude in English Literature from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1984.

She spent the junior year of her studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She later pursued additional graduate studies in acting at the California Institute of the Arts. She and her husband received honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters from Middlebury in 2004.

She married actor Christopher Reeve in Williamstown, Massachusetts in April 1992, and they had one child, William Elliot "Will" Reeve, born on June 7, 1992, whom they raised in Pound Ridge, New York.

Activism

Reeve was thrust into a public role after her husband became a quadriplegic as a result of a horse riding accident in Culpeper, Virginia on May 27, 1995. Reeve then became a motivational speaker and activist for the quality of everyday life of the paralyzed and, after her husband's death, a proponent of the controversial human embryonic stem cell research. Reeve, in an editorial^[3] she wrote in October 2005, confessed that "I still have my soft spot for the quality-of-life grant programs and for the resource center, because it’s really the people part. Chris used to be the visionary who went to Washington to lobby for funding, and I was the one who figured out, 'Is there a wheelchair ramp so that our family can get into this movie theater?' I thought if that’s hard for me, it’s got to be much harder for the majority of people out there." She emphasized care over cure in her philosophy.

In 1996, the Reeves founded the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which funds research on paralysis and works to improve the lives of the disabled. In 2005, the name changed from Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation to its pre-merger name of Christopher Reeve Foundation. It is not known if the name change was from a separation from the American Paralysis Association which merged with the Christopher Reeve Foundation in 1999 or if it had been just cosmetic. Both organization names are interchangeable. To date, it has awarded more than $55 million (USD) in research grants and more than $8 million in quality-of-life grants.

Reeve created fundraiser trinkets for the Foundation. In 1998, a tie she designed for the Christopher Reeve Collection of celebrity-designed ties sold for a limited time through J.C. Penney.^[4] At a press conference to promote the tie collection, she and her husband wore the ties. In 2005, in honor of her husband and put a play on the Superman character he was most famous for, she created and promoted a Superman-shield dog tag that said "Go Forward" and sold them through the foundation.^[5]

After her husband's death on October 10, 2004, she assumed the role of chairperson of the organization. She also endorsed Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for president and introduced him before his speech on science and technology on October 21, 2004.^[6]

Show business career

Her many singing and acting credits included appearances on television, where she had guest roles on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, soap operas All My Children as Eva Stroupe and Loving, among others. She performed at theatres on Broadway, off-Broadway, and at numerous regional theatres. Reeve also did a long-running commercial for Tide laundry detergent that aired during the 1990s. Ironically in 1995 she had a cameo in the HBO movie Above Suspicion that starred her husband where she played a female detective who smoked.

In 2000 she co-hosted a live daily talk show for women on the Lifetime Network with Deborah Roberts called Lifetime Live and also wrote a brief column for the defunct AccessLife.com These articles can be found at the Christopher Reeve Homepage.^[7] She sang the title song on the soundtrack of the HBO drama, In the Gloaming directed by her husband. Reeve also had another cameo in her husband's movie The Brooke Ellison Story as a teacher.

She also authored the book, Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends.^[8] In 2004, she was performing in the Broadway-bound play Brooklyn Boy at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California when she had to rush home to reach her husband's bedside after he went into cardiac arrest and a coma. In April 2005, it was also announced that she signed a seven-figure book deal^[9] with Penguin Books to write about her relationship with her famous husband. It is not known how far Reeve got with writing the book before she died or even if it is still coming out at its scheduled release.

Several months before her death, Reeve taped the PBS documentary The New Medicine focusing on the growing trend in medical care combining holistic and traditional treatment. The program premiered after her death, on March 29, 2006. She also worked on the computer animated movie Everyone's Hero, a project with the working title Yankee Irving when her husband was the director at the time of his death. The movie was released on September 15, 2006.

Illness and death

On August 9, 2005 Reeve announced that, although she had never smoked cigarettes, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Reeve chose to disclose her illness after The National Enquirer announced that it planned to make the information public.

In 2005, Reeve received the "Mother of the Year Award" from the American Cancer Society for her dedication and determination in raising her son after the loss of her husband. In her final public appearances, Reeve stated that the tumor had responded to therapy and was shrinking. She appeared at Madison Square Garden on January 12, 2006, to sing in honor of New York Rangers hockey player, Mark Messier, whose number was retired that evening.

Reeve died on March 6, 2006, aged 44^[10], at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. She is survived by her son, her father, two sisters, Deborah Morosini and Adrienne Morosini Heilman; and her late husband's two grown children (her stepchildren), Matthew Exton Reeve and Alexandra Exton Reeve.

Filmography

• Everyone's Hero (2006)
• The Brooke Ellison Story (2004)
• Above Suspicion (1995)

Trivia

• Dana Reeve loved to ride horses. In 2005, she told Larry King: "I rode my whole life, and after Chris had his accident, I stopped riding, primarily because he loved it so much, and I think it really would have been painful for him if I was going off riding and he wasn't able to. And it didn't mean that much to me to drop."^[11]

• The children's book Dewey Doo-it Helps Owlie Fly Again: A Musical Storybook Inspired by Christopher Reeve was published in 2005 and included an audio to accompany the book with Mandy Patinkin reading the story as well as Reeve and Bernadette Peters singing.^[12]

• On February 2, 2005, eight days before the death of her mother Helen, Reeve attended President George W. Bush's State of the Union address seated in the Capitol gallery in Washington, D.C. as the guest of Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI).^[13]

• The film Superman Returns is dedicated to her and the late Christopher Reeve