Christopher Reeve was an actor and activist. He was best known as the star of the Superman films. Reeve died of heart failure in 2004, nine years after a 1995 horse-riding accident left him paralyzed.

Reeve, a handsome New York-born theatre actor, became a global superstar when he took the lead as the Man of Steel and his alter ego Clark Kent in Richard Donner’s Superman in 1978.