The tragedy and triumph of Superman’s Margot Kidder

As the late actor’s star-making performance in the cult slasher film ‘Black Christmas’ turns 50, Adam White looks back at one of the wildest movie stars of the Seventies, who played Lois Lane, fought the system and took the stigma out of living with mental illness

‘I’ve done all sorts of things, but you just haven’t seen them because they’re often very bad and shown at four in the morning’: Margot Kidder in 1978 (Marc Sennett/Shutterstock)

Before she died in 2018 at the age of 69, Superman actor Margot Kidder told her friends her final wish. If they ever find her body, keep her death a secret. Wrap her in a bedsheet, take her to the forest outside her home in the mountains of Livingston, Montana, and leave her for the wolves. Kidder loved those wolves, regularly feeding them from her back porch. Kidder’s friends, understandably, didn’t abide by her request. But there would have been something oddly fitting about this fate – Hollywood’s wildest movie star, at least for a few years in the Seventies, vanishing into the mysterious recesses of the Montana woods, never to be seen again.

Kidder went back and forth on her own stardom. “After Superman came out, I found it very difficult and hard to deal with,” she said in 1997, of the Lois Lane role that briefly propelled her to international renown. “There is a sense of having to put on this phoney face when you go out in public. I wasn’t very good at it, and it filled me with anxiety and panic. I had to hide the manic depression, for one thing. I just felt inadequate for the job.”

But it always made sense why Kidder was asked to do that job, why Hollywood felt they could harness her undeniable presence on camera and use it to sell romcoms and horror movies. Kidder’s charisma – along with those sharp, beguiling features and whip-crack of a line delivery – is visible from the off in Black Christmas, which turns 50 this month. Along with Brian De Palma’s trippy 1972 psycho-thriller Sisters, the Canadian slasher film made Kidder’s name, announcing her as an actor of unusual verve and bite, whose glamour was always a little chaotic, her spikiness a little sad.

Kidder isn’t the star of Black Christmas, which revolves around a sorority house menaced by a murderous prank caller. That spot is reserved for Olivia Hussey, playing the sorority’s pretty, haunted naif. Kidder, on the other hand, is its trainwreck Barb, a traumatised alcoholic with a messy sex life and a guilt complex, who reacts to deviant phone calls from a killer with swagger and outrage: come and get it if you think you’re tough enough, she more or less barks back at him. Black Christmas doesn’t judge Barb, or punish her for her apparent sins. She’s its most human component. But that effect is also down to Kidder’s performance, which feels startlingly alive and rich in empathy.

Black Christmas was part of a short-lived run of hits for Kidder, which included the Robert Redford drama The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and the goofy haunted house blockbuster The Amityville Horror (1979). Superman came in 1978, her smart, sassy and hopelessly romantic Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane serving as the blueprint for the many actors who played that role in the aftermath, from Teri Hatcher to Amy Adams. Lois’s initial sit-down with Christopher Reeve’s Superman – who flies onto her apartment balcony for an interview – is full of blushing, pining and frazzled pauses. It’s one of those great Seventies movie star performances, perfectly matched by Reeves’ effervescent wholesomeness. Of course, Kidder was propelled to the A-list.

The problem, though, was that Kidder was a bit too offbeat and interesting for all of that. When she moved to Los Angeles from her native Canada in 1970, she lived in a somewhat notorious Malibu beach house that played host to the likes of a young De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon and Martin Scorsese. Powders were snorted, sex was rampant and the next big ideas in filmmaking were formed. (Famously lily-white Spielberg, it should be said, reportedly only ever took part in the last one.) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s seminal 1998 tome on Seventies Hollywood, made this all out to be somewhat sordid, which Kidder disputed. “It was drugs and sex, yes, but it was sweet,” she said. “We were just a bunch of kids who had no money and wanted to change the world.”

Kidder was political and opinionated, and lived smack-dab at the centre of the sexual bohemia of the era. She had flings with De Palma, Richard Pryor and the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. And when Hollywood came calling, she rebuffed the squarer conventions imposed on her. The makers of The Amityville Horror were hungry for publicity stunts and asked her to tell the press the set was haunted – she called it “hogwash” and refused. When Superman’s director Richard Donner was fired from the film’s sequel, she publicly admonished its producers, and was allegedly punished for it – that’s why, it’s long been speculated, Lois is barely a presence in the franchise’s third instalment.

Hanging on the telephone: Kidder connects with a killer in ‘Black Christmas’ (Shutterstock)

She also posed for Playboy, but only on the assurance that she could write an accompanying essay, which is quite literally all about how looking at pictures in Playboy as a teenage girl entirely destroyed her self-esteem. “Fourteen is a nervous age for a girl,” she wrote. “You want to be perfect and no one will tell you how. Your self-confidence is frail as glass, easily shattered. Playboy used to smash mine regularly.”

At the turn of the Eighties, high-profile work dropped off. It coincided with a number of health struggles, Kidder having received a diagnosis of schizophrenia in her twenties, followed by years of a repetitive cycle: a new round of medication, then a round of destructive self-medication, then back again. “None of us ever thought of Margy as mentally ill,” her friend Jennifer Salt said in 1997. “She was bright, courageous, a brilliant actress with extraordinary energy and intelligence … [but] it’s hard to know where the illness leaves off and the greatness begins.”

Kidder’s personal struggles were largely kept out of the spotlight until the early Nineties, when injuries from a car accident left her unable to work and ultimately in debt. Tabloids mocked her when she was photographed selling jewellery in New York to make ends meet. In 1996, a manic episode left the then-47-year-old wandering the streets of Los Angeles for several days, and she was found in a stranger’s garden. A year later, she was upfront about her personal difficulties.

Taking flight: Kidder and Christopher Reeve in 1978’s ‘Superman’ (Shutterstock)

“What’s it like to be the most famous crazy person in the world? It’s a dubious honour,” she joked to The Los Angeles Times in 1997. In 2001, while receiving a Courage in Mental Health award from the California Women’s Mental Health Policy Council, she also thanked the homeless people who kept her safe during the worst days of her crisis. “I was, in common terms, cuckoo,” she said. “But they had compassion and understanding. They knew that my confusion did not negate my humanity. What people need when they’re crazy is not to feel separated from the rest of humanity, but to have that hand reach out with love, and say, ‘OK, this is who you are right now. That’s fine. I’m here for you’.”

Kidder continued to work, often in horror movies or on television, and would happily poke fun at her less-than-glittering acting career. “I’ll [make] practically anything – I’m the biggest whore on the block,” she joked in 2008. “Unless it’s something sexist or cruel, I just love to work. I’ve done all sorts of things, but you just haven’t seen them because they’re often very bad and shown at four in the morning.”

Fandom: Kidder at a comic convention in 2005 (Getty Images)

She also pivoted more substantially to political activism in the mid-Noughties, working with a womens’ protest group in Montana initially called Bushes Against Bush (“We couldn’t go public with that name, so we became Montana Women For,” she’d say). Later, she would campaign for leftist Democrat Bernie Sanders and protest against the construction of oil pipelines. A memoir never happened, but she often teased it. “I’m going to call it I Slept With Everyone on Television,” she said in 2009. “I was in the airport in Minneapolis, and I thought, ‘S*** – what you have to do is have something that catches the eye of people going from Minneapolis to New York that looks like a good, easy read on a plane.’ So that title would sell out right away.”

Little is known of Kidder’s final months. Friends said she harboured addicts in her Livingston home, in a last act of charity and empathy. Or, as her daughter Maggie suggested in a statement, because of her own addictions in the end. Her manager said she died in her sleep, but a coroner later ruled she died from a “self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose”. “It’s a big relief that the truth is out there,” Maggie said. “It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this.”

It made sense. Kidder had, after all, never herself been one for shame – quick to a self-deprecating joke, a plea for compassion and a worthy fight. And even when asked to play doomed slasher movie characters – fated to be introduced and then speedily killed by a gruesome predator – she could always find the tiny cracks of humanity.