Homeless, paranoid and eating out of bins: the tragedy of Superman's original Lois Lane

Telegraph

10-07-2025

When director James Gunn, steward of the high-flying new Superman reboot, was recently asked to list his favourite comic book movies, he singled out Richard Donner's beautifully brash 1978 take on the Man of Steel – the film generally credited with firing the starter pistol for the modern cinematic superhero era.
'How do you take this outrageous concept of a guy who flies around and turn him into something real?' mused Gunn of Donner's Superman – to which his all-new take on the character pays tribute by utilising John Williams's beloved 'da-dah-dah-dah' musical cue.
'I'm definitely influenced by what Donner did, with Superman, and what Christopher Reeve did with Superman and Margot Kidder, who's fantastic in the movie.' After a pause, Gunn gets what you suspect was his actual point all along. 'She's really the heart of it in a lot of ways.'
How perceptive of Gunn to understand that Kidder's plucky girl-reporter Lois Lane is the emotional core of the original Superman. Firstly, she is the perfect audience surrogate – when Superman catches her mid-air and says, 'Easy miss, I've got you', she speaks for us all by saying, 'You've got me – who's got you?'
But as Gunn perceptively notes, Kidder is also the heart of the film: in a story about flying aliens and people shooting lasers from their eyes, her love affair with Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, feels real and grounded – and it elevates Donner's Superman beyond simple, late Seventies escapism. It has also informed Gunn's film in which David Corenswet emulates Reeve's boy-scout-who-can-fly ideal of Superman/Clark Kent, and Rachel Brosnahan portrays Lois Lane as a 'fiercely intelligent' journalist who clearly owes a lot to Kidder.
'I love the romance between Lois and Superman in the first original film, and I think it was really beautiful, but it was also very much Lois going goo-ga over Superman because he can fly around and pick up planets,' said Gunn, explaining how he hoped to build and improve upon the 1978 Superman.
'But what I wanted to see is why does Superman love Lois so much so from the very beginning we did chemistry reads with Superman and Lois, David and Rachel – and that is how they got these roles because not only were they individually great but together as a couple – they bounced off each other in a truly dynamic way.'
The new Superman has the potential to be a career milestone for all involved – not least Warner Bros' DC Comics, thoroughly trounced by bitter rival Marvel across the past decade. Yet no matter how it performs, the cast will hope to avoid the sad fate suffered by Margot Kidder, for whom Superman was a rare bright point in a life marked by hardship and loss.
Kidder, who died in 2018 at the age of 69, was always an outsider in Hollywood – never more so than when Superman briefly made her one of the most recognisable actresses on the planet (and the highest-paid Canadian screen performer ever up to that point). As the most fascinating stars often are, she was a contradiction: hard-headed and determined, yet vulnerable and capable of waywardness.
She became the embodiment of the 'Superman curse' when, after a spell of financial and career reversals through the Nineties, she ended up homeless, scouring for food from bins on LA's Skid Row, with several teeth missing (she'd removed them herself in a fit of paranoia so that she could not be traced through dental records).
Yet even her moments of apparent triumph had an element of tragedy. She had auditioned for Superman in 1977 not because she wanted to fly around in the arms of Christopher Reeve but because she was desperate to escape her first marriage to writer Thomas McGuane – with whom she was living on a ranch in Montana.
'I decided, for the first time in my life, I was going to commit to a man, be a wife and mother,' she told Rolling Stone (she and McGuane had a daughter, Maggie, in 1975). 'It was the only relationship in which I said, 'I'm going all the way, even if it means my own self-destruction.' But I really didn't commit – it was sort of half-assed. I mostly sat around and wept in closets. It was a great lesson.'
Having had enough of weeping in closets, she set her heart on Hollywood and on leaving her husband behind in his ranch in the middle of nowhere.
'One day, I got a phone call from Margot Kidder in Montana,' said her agent, Rick Nicita. 'She said, 'I'm coming back to the business, and I want you to be my agent, okay?' I said, 'I think we ought to meet and talk about it; we hardly know each other.' And she said, 'Hey, let's just do it.' So, I had her fly in and sign agency contracts.
'The first thing I said to her was, 'You can't live in Montana and maintain a career here. You're gonna have to fly in for meetings.' She said fine. So right away, I pushed real hard and got her a meeting for Superman. Then I called her, and she said, 'I can't come in, I have a cutting horse class.' 'Cutting horse?!' I said. 'No way. You're flying in. You've gotta be here.'' Kidder got her wish – she auditioned successfully for Lois Lane and, with one bond, was free of Montana and her marriage to McGuane.
Superman was a gift to comic book fans. Kidder, though, wasn't quite so positive regarding the film's legacy. It cemented her in the public imagination as Lois Lane, the hard-charging journalist – a persona that quickly became constrictive.
She isn't the only one who has had to reckon with the Lois Lane of those movies. Every actress to subsequently take on the role since, from Teri Hatcher in Lois and Clark to Amy Adams in the DC Extended Universe, has had to have a dialogue with Kidder's Lane, whether by pushing in the opposite direction (Hatcher) or riffing cautiously on Kidder's portrayal (Adams). It remains to be seen how well Brosnahan will deal with Lane and the attendant baggage.
Outsiders saw Superman as the defining moment in her life and career. However, for Kidder, her before-and-after-moment was a car accident in 1990. She was back in her native Canada, filming a cable adaptation of the Nancy Drew novels, when she injured her spinal cord in what she had assumed to be a minor collision.
But the pain grew worse and she resisted going under the knife because of the small but real danger of paralysis. Kidder turned to painkillers, a dependency that, she said, left her thinking 'muddled'.
Surgery eventually helped. However, her insurer refused to settle the bills, and she ended up with six figures in debt. Always a little irrational, her decline was rapid.
'There were days I just desperately wanted to die,' she would tell People magazine.
Rock bottom came in 1996 when she became convinced her first husband, McGuane, was stalking her. She went missing for four days in Los Angeles and was found, dishevelled and incoherent, in a side street, her teeth yanked out. 'I was like one of those ladies you see talking to the space aliens on the street corner in New York,' she later said.
Kidder had been born in Yellowknife in Canada's remote Northwest Territories. Her father was a mining engineer, and her mother was a history teacher. Her interest in show business was ignited when she was 12, and her mother took her to New York for a Broadway performance of Bye Bye Birdie. 'That was it. I knew I had to go far away.'
As a young woman, Kidder had an ethereal quality. She appeared on the Dick Cavett show in 1970 wearing a white gown without shoes and explained that, since she did not plan on a long-term career in acting, she was training in Vancouver with Robert Altman to be a movie editor.
Hollywood's call would nonetheless prove irresistible, and she was soon living in a California beach house with fellow actress Jennifer Salt. Their home became a legendary hang-out for a gang of up-and-coming young film-makers and actors – among them Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon and Brian De Palma, with whom Kidder would have a relationship and who cast her in his 1972 psychological horror Sisters.
'It was a wonderful time to be young,' she remembered. 'The Sixties didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War – we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex.
'We were sweet lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.'
Kidder was even then hard to pin down – a hippy with a hard-headed streak, a phlegmatic soul who found the travails of Hollywood often too much to handle.
Her first big part, opposite Robert Redford in 1975's The Great Waldo Pepper, was heralded by everyone, apart from Kidder herself. She hated herself in the film about stunt pilots in Twenties America and expressed the belief that she should have been cut entirely from the final edit.
Kidder didn't have high hopes for Superman, either. This was the pre-superhero era, and Kidder was only vaguely aware of the Man of Steel. Going to London to try out for a cheesy blockbuster wasn't an opportunity – it was a potential escape hatch from her miserable marriage.
'I really wanted the part. It was frightening as all auditions are. I had my first audition then I flew from Montana, where I lived, to London to do a screen test. I went 'I gotta get this movie because your marriage is really bad, but you don't have the strength to get out. But if you get a big movie, you can get out,' so there was that motivation.'
She didn't think the movie would do very well – especially when she clapped eyes on the supposed star.
'When I first met Christopher Reeve before filming he was the skinniest, dorkiest guy you could imagine, his pant legs six inches above his ankles. I mean I thought this is Superman? So all I kept going was 'look like you love him' and it worked I got the part.'
Despite her misgivings, Kidder was immediately definitive as Lois Lane. She imbued the character with a raw-knuckled drive, topped off with lashings of Old Hollywood moxie. Her Lois wasn't just the best superhero girlfriend ever – she was one of the all-time great screen journalists, a newshound determined to get the story no matter what (even if, as in Superman II, it involved climbing the Eiffel Tower to eavesdrop on terrorists).
But if Kidder effortlessly inhabited the role, the off-screen adjustments were more difficult. 'Fame is weird, is what it really is,' she said. 'It's the weirdest thing in the world.'
Following Superman, her first major part was in The Amityville Horror. Again, she was the only one not impressed with herself. While the media talked in shocked tones about the chilling horror and the real story it was based on, Kidder derided it as low-grade hokum.
'What a piece of s---,' she would say of it. 'I couldn't believe that anyone would take that seriously. I was laughing my whole way through it, much to the annoyance of Rod Steiger, who took the whole thing very seriously. At the time, my agent proposed sort of a 'one for me, one for them' policy. That was one for them.'
Her personal life was meanwhile in near-constant turmoil. She had a long-term relationship with Richard Pryor, the comedian occasionally breaking off the courtship to marry other lovers. Kidder was herself married and divorced three times – including a six-day marriage to actor John Heard in 1979. Other paramours included writer/director Tom Mankiewicz and former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau (father of Justin).
After her meltdown in 1996, she gradually put her life back together, though the acting roles generally dried up (she popped up on the Superman spin-off Smallville, describing the part as boring). Living in rural Montana, she found solace as a public speaker and activist – talking about her mental health struggles and campaigning for Left-wing causes.
'I got a reputation for being sort of nuts and difficult, because I was at that point, so I wasn't much in demand,' she told the AV Club in 2009. 'And also, on the basic level, I'd made a lot of movies that didn't make money. And if you make movies that don't make money – I mean, it is a business, after all – you are not in demand.'
But the demons eventually quietened, and she made peace with her tumultuous life on and off camera. She was even able to look at Superman and Lois Lane in a positive light.