Quote of the day by Christopher Reeve (Image: Wikipedia)

Quote of the day by Christopher Reeve (Image: Wikipedia)

Reeve became internationally famous for playing Superman in the 1978 film and its sequels. After his 1995 accident left him paralysed, his public life took a genuinely different direction. The quote therefore also says something real about how other people’s perception can actually help preserve a person’s own sense of identity during a genuinely difficult period.

He became a prominent advocate for people with disabilities and for research into spinal cord injuries, founding what became the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation. His experience clearly changed how many people understood the actual man behind the superhero costume. The fictional Superman represented extraordinary physical power. Reeve’s later life demonstrated a genuinely different form of strength instead, continuing to work, advocate and contribute despite circumstances he could never simply overcome through effort alone. The phrase can be understood as referring to the people who continued to see Reeve for considerably more than his disability. To his family, his friends and the hotel staff who spoke to him that night, he was never simply the man in the wheelchair. He remained someone they genuinely loved, admired and looked up to.

Best known for playing Superman on screen, Reeve became a wheelchair user in 1995 after a horse-riding accident left him paralysed from the neck down. This line comes from his own memoir, Still Me, in a passage describing what happened backstage at the 1996 Academy Awards, where he made a surprise appearance to present an award less than a year after his accident.

“The fact that I was in a wheelchair and dependent on others for almost every aspect of my life had not diminished the fact that I was and always would be… their Superman,” he wrote. Many told him they were praying for him. Others looked him directly in the eye and said simply, “we love you, Superman.

Christopher Reeve ‘s words speak to identity, courage and the real difference between physical limitation and personal strength. His understanding of himself, it turns out, was never actually limited to what his body could or could not physically do, and the way he arrived at that realisation, through the reaction of ordinary people working that night, makes the quote considerably richer than it first appears. Reeve wrote in Still Me about entering the venue that night through garages, kitchens and service corridors, meeting cooks, waiters, chambermaids and maintenance crews along the way. You’re our hero. He admitted he could barely believe they meant it at first. Then he realised something that clearly moved him.