Unceasing fight to prove experts wrong

There really was something superhuman about Christopher Reeve. From the day in 1995 when he tumbled from his horse, broke his neck and lost all sensation in his body, he ceased to be a mere man and existed, rather, as a symbol of everything that is indomitable about the human spirit.

He lived in a world of pain and unimaginable frustration, yet of all the many thousands of photographs taken, few show him without his cheery grin. That stiff smile became the person. It stood for his refusal to give up, his love of life and his unceasing struggle to regain his own.

"You only get one," he said, shortly after the accident. "You can't say: 'I've spoiled this one, can I have another, please?'' This was Reeve's defining philosophy: to somehow beat the odds and get back the life he had lost. It was, after all, an enviable one.

He was born into an affluent New York family: his father was a writer and academic; his mother a journalist. They divorced when Reeve was four, but he continued to spend long periods with his father who introduced him to his own circle of writers and intellectuals.

Reeve attended a private school and was a bright pupil but from the age of eight it seemed to his family he was destined for the stage. By the age of 16 he had an agent; he went through college while simultaneously appearing in various stage roles.

In 1978, at 27, he was offered the part of Superman. The film came at the beginning of the computerised special effects revolution that was to utterly change the cinema. Moviegoers were told they would believe a man could fly and, yes, we almost did when Reeve swooped over Manhattan, his crimson cape fluttering in the slipstream. At the

Academy Awards dinner the following year, veteran actor John Wayne turned to Cary Grant and, gesturing towards Reeve, said: "This is our new man. He's taking over."

And so it seemed. Reeve was incomparably handsome, at 6ft 4in he had a superb physique and he could act. After Superman he made 17 feature films and starred in 150 plays. His professional

gave him just about everything he could have wanted. Off-screen, he was politically active for the Democrats and he always made time for good books and music. He played the piano to professional standards and adored rock music.

But his greatest passions were exhilarating and, by definition, dangerous sports: ocean sailing and riding. Yet the cross-country event he entered in Virginia-in 1995 was not considered particularly risky and he himself wondered many times what went wrong:

"The jump my horse refused was easy. Why I didn't stay on, I don't know. It was not as though I was trying to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorbike."

When he fell, he landed on his head. The top vertebra of his spine was fractured, an injury that almost precisely replicated the effect of being hanged. He remembered nothing of it until he woke up in hospital three days later. He could feel nothing below his neck.

At first, the battle was to stay alive. He was in intensive care for a month, and then could only breathe through a ventilator attached to a tube. He could speak only a few words, forming them quickly to catch his exhaling breath. It was a condition, he recalled later, that made him wonder if he was still a human being.

He was 43 years old and, he admitted that he seriously wondered how he could take his own life. Even that was not an option. His wife, Dana, was always there. He had a full-time nurse but his wife rarely left his side. Her devotion, friends said, enabled him to find the strength that gave him his extraordinary resolve.

Reeve decided to try to recover - something the doctors told him was impossible. He began researching his condition, scouring the world for news of research and developments that allowed him to hope that one day he would walk again.

He moved to a wheelchair; an electronic aid in his diaphragm enabled him to breathe more or less normally. One unforgettable day, in bed with Dana at home near New York, he realised he could feel her touch on his leg. Six years after the accident he wrote this about his daily life: "I wake up at about 6.30am, feeling more like stone than flesh because I've lain rigid all night. I use the hour between then and when Dana gets up to adjust between my dreams and the reality of my situation. I've never been disabled in my dreams - I'm sailing, riding, travelling, making films."

The last years of Reeve's life were devoted to making those dreams real again. He began to notice small improvements; he became obsessed with the idea that medical science was wrong when it said the spinal cord could not regenerate itself.

Bouts of pneumonia, skin and kidney infections, knocked him back, but he always recovered, even more determined than before. He set up his own research establishment and spent years at the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in New York. One day, a friend took him out on his boat, his wheelchair lashed to the deck.

But the breakthrough he said he would find never came. Some doctors were critical, saying his optimism gave false hope to others. There was a view, perhaps not widely held, that he should accept the inevitability of his condition.

If he did, he never showed it. The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation continued to search the world for a cure. Towards the end of his life he became particularly interested in stem cell research and followed closely developments in Britain.

The sheer power of his determination became, in a way, his mobility. He never did walk or ride again, but he never gave up hope. Many believed with him, and that was his triumph.