Margot Kidder
Margaret Ruth Kidder was a Canadian and American actress and activist. She amassed several film and television credits in her career spanning five decades, including her widely known role as Lois Lane in the original Superman films. Her accolades included two Canadian Film Awards, an Emmy Award, a Genie Award, and a Saturn Award.
Born in Yellowknife to a Canadian mother and an American father, Kidder was raised in the Northwest Territories and several Canadian provinces. She began her acting career in the 1960s, appearing in low-budget Canadian productions and winning the Canadian Film Special Award in 1969. She first received attention for appearing in the comedy film Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, the horror films Sisters, Black Christmas, and The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, and the drama films A Quiet Day in Belfast and The Great Waldo Pepper.
Kidder's international breakthrough came with playing Lois Lane in Superman and Kathy Lutz in The Amityville Horror, which were blockbuster films. For these roles, she was twice nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Actress, winning in 1978 for Superman. She reprised the role of Lois in three Superman sequels, and also played Rita Harris in the comedy film Heartaches and made her stage debut with the play Bus Stop. After a stint of films and projects that were ambivalently received, Kidder sustained serious injuries in a car accident that left her temporarily paralyzed in 1990, and suffered from a highly publicized manic episode and nervous breakdown in 1996 stemming from bipolar disorder.
Kidder thereafter maintained steady work in independent films and television, notably appearing in the hockey film Chicks with Sticks and the horror picture Halloween II, and playing a guest role on R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour. She maintained dual citizenship and was an outspoken political, environmental and antiwar activist. Kidder died on May 13, 2018, of an alcohol and drug overdose, which was ruled a suicide.
Early life
Margaret Ruth Kidder, one of five children, was born on October 17, 1948, in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, the daughter of Jocelyn Mary "Jill", a history teacher from British Columbia, and Kendall Kidder, an American explosives expert and engineer originally from New Mexico. She was of Welsh and English descent.Kidder was born in Yellowknife because of her father's employment, which required the family to live in remote locations. Her father subsequently served as the manager of the Yellowknife Telephone Company from 1948 to 1951. She had one sister, Annie, who is an actress and executive director of the People for Education charity, and three brothers: John, Michael, and Peter. Two of her siblings married notable Canadians: Annie married actor Eric Peterson and John married politician Elizabeth May. Kidder's niece Janet Kidder is also an actress.
Recalling her childhood in northern Canada, Kidder said: "We didn't have movies in this little mining town. When I was 12, my mom took me to New York City|New York and I saw Bye Bye Birdie, with people singing and dancing, and that was it. I knew I had to go far away. I was clueless, but I okay." In addition to Yellowknife, she also spent some time growing up in Labrador City, Newfoundland and Labrador. Kidder became interested in politics from a young age, which she credited to debates her parents would have over the dinner table; her mother had socialist leanings, while her father was a conservative Republican.
Kidder had mental health issues from a young age, which stemmed from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. "I knew I was different, had these mind flights that other people didn't seem to have," she recalled. At age 14, she attempted suicide. Kidder found an outlet in acting, as she felt she could "let my real self out ... and no one would know it was me." "Nobody ever encouraged me to be an actress," she recalled. "It was taken as a joke ... As a teenager, I envisioned myself in every book I read. I wanted to be Henry Miller and Thomas Wolfe. I wanted to eat everything on the world's platter, but my eyes were bigger than my stomach."
She attended several schools during her youth through her family's relocations, eventually graduating from Havergal College, a high-school-level boarding school in Toronto, in 1966. In 1966, she found herself pregnant by her boyfriend, who arranged for an illegal abortion. The abortionist was located in a hotel room and filled Kidder's uterus with Lysol to terminate the pregnancy. After graduating from Havergal, Kidder relocated to Vancouver to attend the University of British Columbia, but dropped out after one year. She returned to Toronto, where she found work as a model.
Career
1960s
Kidder's television debut was in an episode of Wojeck aired January 16, 1968, billed as "Margaret Kidder". She very shortly afterward adopted the name Margot Kidder, which she used for the rest of her life. She then made her film debut in a 49-minute film titled The Best Damn Fiddler from Calabogie to Kaladar, a drama set in a Canadian logging community, which was produced by the Challenge for Change. Kidder's 1969 appearance in the episode "Does Anybody Here Know Denny?" on the Canadian drama series Corwin earned her a Canadian Film Award for "outstanding new talent."Kidder's first major feature was the 1969 American film Gaily, Gaily, a period comedy starring Beau Bridges, in which she portrayed a prostitute. She subsequently appeared in a number of TV drama series for the CBC, including guest appearances on Adventures in Rainbow Country, and a semi-regular role as a young reporter on McQueen, and as a panelist on Mantrap, which featured discussions centered on a feminist perspective.
1970s
During the 1971–72 season, she co-starred as barmaid Ruth in Nichols, a James Garner–led Western, which aired 22 episodes on NBC. During an August 3, 1970, interview on The Dick Cavett Show, Kidder stated that she was ambivalent toward having a film career, and was considering working as a film editor in the future. At this time, she had become an acquaintance of director Robert Altman's, and served as an apprentice assisting him in editing Brewster McCloud. She subsequently appeared in "Such Dust As Dreams Are Made On", the first pilot for Harry O, which aired in March 1973. She was a guest star in a 1972 episode of the George Peppard detective series Banacek.After moving to Los Angeles, Kidder was cast opposite Gene Wilder in Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx as an exchange student in Ireland who becomes the love interest of a poor horse manure collector in Dublin, whom she almost runs over with her car. After filming in Ireland, Kidder relocated to New York City to study acting further. A year later, she returned to California, and was cast in the Brian De Palma film Sisters, which gained notoriety for both the director and Kidder, who as leading lady, portrayed conjoined twins, one of whom is a suspect in a brutal murder. Kidder had been in a relationship with De Palma at the time, and had been roommates with co-star Jennifer Salt in Los Angeles. Sisters went on to achieve critical recognition, being considered among the best American films of the decade by critic Robin Wood, as well as one of the most important films in Kidder's career by film critic G. Allen Johnson.
In 1974, she starred in the slasher film Black Christmas, for which she won a Canadian Film Award for Best Actress, followed by a role as a prostitute in the Terrence Malick–scripted The Gravy Train. She received another Canadian Film Award for Best Actress for her performance in the war drama A Quiet Day in Belfast. Also in 1974, Kidder made her directorial debut with a 50-minute short film produced for the American Film Institute, titled Again. The film follows a woman who pastes photographs of her former lovers on her wall, continuously searching for "Mr. Right".
Kidder had a central supporting role in the airplane-themed drama The Great Waldo Pepper opposite Robert Redford and Susan Sarandon, followed by a lead role in the psychological horror film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, directed by J. Lee Thompson, in which she portrayed a woman about whom a college professor has recurring nightmares. Variety praised her performance in the latter film as "outstandingly rich." In the summer of 1975, Kidder was hired to direct a documentary short chronicling the making of The Missouri Breaks, a Western film starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. "I was such a jerk," she recalled. "I mean, I thought they wanted a real documentary. So, I filmed all the behind-the-scenes rows and arguments and shot footage of the vet shooting up the horses with tranquilizers so the actors would look as if they rode well. What an idiot I was. Then when they fired me, I realized what they'd wanted was a publicity film."
She subsequently co-starred with Peter Fonda in 92 in the Shade, also in 1975, a drama directed by novelist Thomas McGuane, based on his own book. Kidder then took a hiatus from acting, though she appeared in the March 9, 1975, edition of The American Sportsman, learning how to hang glide, and providing the narration, with a remote microphone recording her reactions in flight; the segment concluded with Kidder doing solos soaring amid the Wyoming Rockies. She was also photographed by Douglas Kirkland for the March 1975 issue of Playboy, accompanied by an article written by Kidder herself.
File:Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder at Superman premiere.jpg|thumb|Christopher Reeve and Kidder at the premiere of Superman in 1978
In 1977, eager to return to acting, Kidder read for the character of Lois Lane in Superman: The Movie, only one month before principal photography was scheduled to begin. Kidder was flown to England for screen-tests. Upon meeting with director Richard Donner, Kidder tripped while walking into the room. Donner recalled: "I just fell in love with her. It was perfect, this clumsy ." She was ultimately cast in the role, which would become her most iconic. Filming lasted about 18 months.
Superman was released during Christmas 1978 and was a major commercial success, grossing $300 million worldwide. She was deemed "most charming" by Vincent Canby in The New York Times. James Harwood of Variety said that she "plays perfectly off both of his personalities and her initial double-entendre interview with Superman is wickedly coy, dancing round the obvious question any red-blooded girl might ask herself about such a magnificent prospect." Sonia Saraiya of Vanity Fair praised her ability to balance Lois's ditzy nature with her ambition and no-nonsense attitude, and wrote: "Kidder played a human woman who could believably both attract and deserve a man who is canonically perfect, with the physique of a Greek god and the moral compass of a saint." For the role, Kidder won the Saturn Award for Best Actress.
After completing filming for Superman, Kidder starred as Kathy Lutz in the supernatural horror film The Amityville Horror, which further cemented her status as one of Hollywood's leading ladies. The Amityville Horror was a major commercial success, grossing over $86 million in the United States, but it received mixed reviews from critics. Janet Maslin of The New York Times, though giving the film a mixed review, said Kidder "stubbornly remains the bright-eyed life of the party ." In retrospect, Kidder called the film "a piece of shit." The same year, Kidder hosted an episode of the American sketch comedy TV show Saturday Night Live.