He takes a sedative to control nighttime spasms, and soon enough he's back on his sailboat, battling the sea. Reeve in his breakthrough role as Superman in 1980. In that time span, Reeve has gone from playing a hero on screen to being widely perceived as one in life. It seems the traits that helped him win the first role have served him well in the second. And that combined with a certain amount of self-discipline, which I learned from my earliest years in the theater, helps me to keep going.
Nobody wants another actor.
There's too many of them now already. . . . To keep believing in yourself in spite of those kinds of obstacles is certainly good preparation for what I'm going through now. For a lot of years he made it look easy. He grew up in Princeton, N.J., living with his mother after his parents' early divorce. He attended Cornell for three years and then, determined to become a serious classical actor, auditioned for Juilliard.