The Truth About Christopher Reeve and Dana Reeve's Awe-Inspiring Love Story

For about 10 minutes, Christopher Reeve wanted to end his life. So when wife Dana Reeve told him to wait and if he still felt that way in two years, then they'd figure it out, he knew what she was doing.

"On one level, you could say she used the oldest selling technique in the book," the Superman star recalled in his 2002 memoir Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life. "You offer customers a free trial, a free sample, with no obligation and no money down, in order to get them on the hook."

But in this case, he continued, "On another level, a much deeper one where our love and respect for each other has always lived, she knew that I was in the first stage of a natural reaction to tragedy. Asking me to wait was the perfect course of action. She was giving me room, the freedom to make a choice, yet knowing what that choice would be in time."

Chris was describing a moment that occurred in the ICU several days after he was thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition on May 27, 1995. He had suffered what doctors called a "complete" injury: His spinal cord was severed at the C-2 vertebra, rendering his brain unable to transmit signals to the rest of his body. He was paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on his own.

"When I first realized what my situation was, I thought, Maybe I'm too much trouble. Maybe this will be just too hard on everybody. Maybe I should just check out," the actor said on Larry King Live the following year. "And my wife—my beautiful, extraordinary wife, Dana—put the end to it with one sentence. She said, 'But you're still you, and I love you. End of story.'"

One look at his children—Matthew and Alexandra, whom he shared with ex-partner Gae Exton, and his and Dana's son William—and he further realized he had no choice but to stick around.

Getting around in a motorized wheelchair and breathing with the help of a ventilator, he continued to act, produce and direct, write two books (by dictating to an assistant), advocate for better care and insurance for the disabled community and fundraise for the American Paralysis Association (which later changed its name to the Christopher Reeve Foundation).

"Dana's intuition about what my state of mind would be two years after the accident proved exactly right," Chris noted in his 2002 book. "I was glad to be alive, not out of obligation to others, but because life was worth living."

He also became a more present father, and now 32-year-old Will Reeve—who was a few weeks shy of his third birthday when his father's accident occurred—remembers his dad always being there for him.

"Any milestone that I had—first day of school, birthdays, holidays—he was there for," Will recalled exclusively to E! News ahead of the Sept. 21 release of the feature documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. "He taught me how to ride a bike by telling me what to do, and that was meaningful," not least because his dad at one point thought such moments would be impossible for him.

"Every milestone in my life was a milestone in his life while we were together," Will said. "It didn't matter he was in a wheelchair."

Chris' stated goal was to walk again—a 2000 Super Bowl commercial for Nuveen Investments in which the actor stood up and took steps, courtesy of special effects, was a jaw-dropper—and he was a supporter of embryonic stem cell research to treat spinal cord injuries and debilitating neurological conditions.

His causes inevitably became Dana's as well, and because she was by his side throughout, the New Jersey-born actress was subsequently hailed as a superwoman for staying so strong.

And maybe she was a saint. But she was also just really in love and had a family to take care of, and she resisted the hyperbole.

"It bothers me to be thought of that way," Dana told Good Housekeeping in 1997. "Of course I'm doing this. What other option is there? What happened was a truly terrifying, life-altering thing, and my initial response was just like being hit by a bucket of water."

And while she certainly did a lot for him, "We decided I must be his wife, and not his nurse," Dana told the New York Times in 1998. "Though I occasionally do his hair shampoo, because it's a sexy, intimate thing. Chris is incredibly resilient. He will occasionally get down, hit rock bottom. I just listen, and try to find things that can help. Close physical contact is helpful."

Chris' daughter Alexandra Reeve Givens, who shares 9-year-old son Christopher Russell Reeve Givens with husband Garren Givens, told E! that her favorite moment in the documentary is a home movie clip (shot by her brother Matthew) in which Dana prepares a cup of coffee for her husband and gets into bed with him while he sips it through a straw.

Watching the film felt "like we just got two hours with our family back," Alexandra said, "just these normal moments of family life captured again."

Chris said his and Dana's marriage was happy before the accident and in a way even "happier" for him afterward, explaining on Larry King Live in 1997, "Because every moment is so precious. I nearly died twice in 1995. So I've been to the edge and back. And the fact, you know, that everything that we do, every place we go, everything we see, we share it in a new light. And that really is just a triumph."

And "I seriously tested the marriage vows," he added. "You talk about 'in sickness and health.' We got more than we bargained for. But the fact is, Dana never flinched."

The couple met in June 1987 when he was doing a play and she was singing in a cabaret at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. Dana admittedly wasn't sure she could trust the 6-foot-4 heartthrob, who was only recently out of a 10-year relationship with model executive Exton.

"I made it very clear to him that I wanted to know his intentions," Dana told Total Theater in 1999. "If it was going to be what-I-did-on-my-summer vacation, that yes, we could do that, but I wanted to know. We had been dating only a few weeks and he was very effusive, saying he loved me and could imaging spending the rest of his life with me. I said, 'Now wait a minute. You've had a lot of women in your life. Is this part of what you do to woo them?'"

But Dana soon fell for both Superman and Clark Kent, finding the Cornell University grad and Juilliard alum had quite the keen intellect.

The pair lived together for years until, one night at dinner, he recalled in his 1998 memoir Still Me, "I just put down my fork and asked her to marry me." (The book's title was inspired by his wife's life-saving assurance of "you're still you.")

He had "always been afraid of marriage," Chris acknowledged in Nothing Is Impossible, "perhaps because there had been a long history of failures for many generations in my family." (His own parents divorced when he was 4.)

But when he and Dana swapped vows on April 11, 1992, he wrote, "somehow I absolutely believed that they were true."

Will was born two months later, on June 7.

Now an ABC News correspondent, Will told E! that a photo taken on his first birthday of him (wearing cow ears) with his mom and dad—in which they're planting a tree outside the family home in Pound Ridge, N.Y.—has had a place of pride next to his bed everywhere he's ever lived.

Less than two years later, Chris—who initially learned to ride a horse for a 1985 adaptation of Anna Karenina and started competing in 1989— had his accident at the Commonwealth Dressage and Combined Training Association in Culpepper, Va.

"The thing that made me most angry was that I was never reckless," he told the NY Times in 1998. Citing the FAA handbook (he also flew planes), he added, "'The outcome of any maneuver must never seriously be in doubt.' That was the rule I lived by in all the sports I did."

And his family had no choice but to adjust to their new normal. 

"The stark difference between before and after the accident is almost too much to bear,'' Dana told the NY Times. "I never discuss the accident. I did once, for Chris' book."

They also were lucky enough, Chris told the paper, to be able to cover the costs of his care, including his team of "10 nurses, five aides, round the clock." 

Meanwhile, Dana voluntarily put her career on the back burner after becoming a mom, but once Christopher went back to work following his accident (earning an Emmy nomination for directing 1997's In the Gloaming and winning a SAG Award for his performance as the wheelchair-bound amateur sleuth who investigates a murder without leaving his apartment in the 1998 TV remake of Rear Window), so did she.

"We were definitely an acting family," Dana said on Larry King Live in February 2005. And Chris "was great in terms of supporting me. He was such an involved dad that when Will had fewer physical needs, where [he] just really needed a ride and a cheering section, Chris was very much able to be there for him."

While her family still came first, "I am a better person and more able to give by doing something in my career that I find fulfilling," Dana told Total Theater in 1999 during rehearsals for a production of Enter the Guardsman.

Since the accident, she said, "You get into a different kind of pattern and into a different definition of normal. Although it seems less dramatic or less traumatic than it did, I still don't take jobs that take me out of town for long periods of time."

In the fall of 2004, Dana was performing in a production of Brooklyn Boy in Costa Mesa, Calif. and, she told Larry King, flying back to New York for "actors' weekends," Sunday to Tuesday.

The Saturday of Oct. 9, 2004, was "a great day" for Chris, she recalled. He had attended Will's hockey game (his team won), spoke with then-presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry on the phone, talked to Dana (she told him she couldn't wait to come home) and watched the Yankees play on TV. 

But that night, she got off stage and was met with a message to call her husband's doctor. Chris—who had battled health complications from the time of his accident—was in the hospital after suffering cardiac arrest.

Marsha Garces-Williams, the second wife of Chris' dear friend Robin Williams, quickly got Dana on a private flight back East. Chris was still alive but in a coma when Dana arrived at Northern Westchester Hospital, where he died on Oct. 10.

"Some people have said to me, 'Do you feel like you got to say goodbye?'" Dana said. "And I feel like for nine-and-a-half years, we had the deathbed conversation. I think you have to live the conversation, and I think we did."

They talked about death frequently "because we were living a life that was really always on the edge," she explained. "There was a lot of challenge and a lot of hardship. When you live with a spinal cord injury, there are life-threatening situations on a regular basis. There are a lot of issues that you deal with. And we were not afraid to have big talks."

While his death at 52 was attributed to heart failure, Dana believed Chris likely had a reaction to one of the drugs he was given in the course of trying to save his life.

"He had a very particular physiognomy that he would react to things that no one reacted to, or he would react to something on the third or fourth dosage, where he had been fine," she said. "And in this case, that was I think what happened, which precipitated a series of catastrophic events which he just couldn't come out of."

The family held a memorial service at the Unitarian Church in Westport, Conn., that Chris and Dana had started attending regularly after his accident. Chris had never been particularly religious, but he appreciated the welcoming congregation, writing in his 2002 book, "Gradually I have come to believe that spirituality is found in the way we live our daily lives. It means spending time thinking about others."

Chris had wanted his memorial to be a party, Dana told Larry, "and I had to apologize to him. I said, 'I don't really feel much like having a party.' I apologized to his spirit. But we did celebrate his life, absolutely. He had a lot to celebrate. In the 52 years that he lived, he accomplished so much."

And Dana was prepared to press on with what had become her husband's life work as chair of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, raising money for research, funding care programs for people living with paralysis and lobbying Congress for better protections for the disabled community.

She also still hoped to make her Broadway debut, a dream deferred after Chris died.

But in August 2005, Dana shared that she was battling lung cancer. As a nonsmoker, she was "completely shocked" by the diagnosis, she told Entertainment Tonight.

At a fundraiser for their foundation in November 2005, she said her late husband was "a great model" when it came to staying optimistic. "I was married to a man who never gave up."

So far, she added, "I'm beating the odds and defying every statistic the doctors can throw at me."

But her condition took a turn and Dana died on March 6, 2006, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 44.

Less than a year beforehand she had told Larry King, "In a way, I think people take sometimes for granted their life and what they have."

She and Chris, by way of his accident, became "very much aware of what we had and the gifts of life. And that's one of the ironic hidden gifts behind disability, is that you just realize the gifts that you have are precious."

All of the above is why theatergoers have been tearing up just watching the trailer for Super/Man, let alone the entire film.

"Of course it sparks a range of emotions, from joyful memories to grief and immense sadness," Matthew Reeve, whose dad's framed "S" from his Superman costume now hangs in his own son's room, told E! News. And to hear his sister and half-brother, for the first time, "tell certain parts of the story from their perspective, challenging is not the right word."

Will, who was 13 when his mom died, understood the sentiment. "We're so protective over each other, we're so close with each other, we love each other so much," he said, "that there were hard parts there, to see how this shared experience affected each of them in their own ways."

He added, "Seeing my mom and dad in all their glory brings me back to a happy place, but one that's tinged with sadness, of course. And I give space and hold weight equally for those things, because that's part of the human experience."

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story opens in select theaters Sept. 21, followed by an encore presentation Sept. 25, what would have been the actor's 72nd birthday.