Margot Kidder

Born in Yellowknife (Canada), on October 17, 1948, Margareth Ruth Kidder was clear since she was a child that she wanted to be an actress. At that time, she already suffered from bipolar disorder, a problem that led her to try to commit suicide on several occasions. At 14 she took a handful of codeine pills because a boyfriend of hers had left her and she was hallucinating. “Unfortunately, it never occurred to anyone to send me to a psychiatrist because they thought she was just a broken-hearted teenager,” she later stated.

After graduating high school, she moved to Los Angeles to start her career, but didn’t have much luck until she met an agent who landed her a major role in the  Norman Jewison comedy The Roaring Years of  Chicago . She next played her first leading role in  I Have a Cousin in the Bronx , where she plays a student who has an affair with an Irish immigrant. 

After a season in New York, studying acting, she returns to Los Angeles, where she befriends then-unknown  Martin Scorsese ,  Steven Spielberg  and  Brian de Palma , who recruited her as the lead actress for  Sisters , where she plays twin sisters. one kind and the other evil. She was not her only notable contribution to horror, as she also headlined the  Black Christmas  and  the Amityville Horror , and was the farmer girlfriend of  Robert Redford , stunt pilot in  Carnival of Eagles .

After marrying fellow actor  Thomas McGuane , in 1976, she gave birth to their only daughter, Maggie McGuane, and retired for a while, until two years later she divorced and decided to return. She is offered the opportunity to play the protagonist of  Superman , a luxurious adaptation of the superhero’s adventures, shot at a time when she did not have many precedents, which is why she has served as a model in the subsequent emergence of the subgenre. The film is a huge success, so she would repeat as the journalist Lois Lane in  Superman II  (1980), and  Superman III (1983), which had a lukewarm reception, so the producers of the saga, Ilya and Alexander Salking, decided not to launch more sequels. They sold the rights for a fourth installment to Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, at the helm of the B-series production company The Cannon Group, which launched the disastrous  Superman IV, In Search of Peace , from 1987. Poorer than the productions previous ones, it flopped completely and in some countries it was released directly to video.

By then,  Margot Kidder  had been typecast as the character, suffering from the same problem as her co-star  Christopher Reeve . She did not hesitate to accept roles in byproducts and telefilms, appearing briefly in  Richard Donner ‘s Maverick ,  which had already cast her as Lois Lane. She also appears in series like  Law & Order: Special Victims Unit . 

After failing in his relationships with actor  John Heard , father of  Macaulay Culkin  in  Home Alone , and French director  Philippe de Broca, since the mid-80s he decides to remain without a partner. Unfortunately, her mental pathology worsened, to the point that she was involved in a terrible incident in 1996, when a virus erased the memories she was writing from her computer. Returning from Los Angeles, where she had gone to ask a computer specialist whether the files could be recovered, the thought occurred to her while waiting for her flight at the airport that her first husband, McGuane, and the CIA were trying to to kill her because her memories could change the world. She began to scream, and disappeared for several days, until she was found by a woman in her backyard.

Since then he has remained quite stable, because although he rejected lithium treatment and opted for alternative therapies, he never got so out of control again. In his last years of life he continued to accept small roles at a good pace, with appearances in films like  Halloween 2  and series like  Five Brothers .