News stories about the death of Margot Kidder have of course focused on her fame playing Lois Lane opposite the late Christopher Reeve in four popular Superman movies in the 1970s and 1980s.
But Kidder, who was 69 when she was found dead in her Montana home Sunday, also was known for a dark chapter in her life, when she suffered an infamous 1996 mental breakdown on the streets of Los Angeles.
However, as the months and years went on, Kidder didn’t shy away from talking about her breakdown and her diagnosis with bipolar disorder. In fact, she became willing to share harrowing details about her “most public freak-out in history,” which included a four-day ordeal in which she wound up in a homeless camp and was almost raped.
In this way, she turned that dark chapter into something positive. She became an advocate for people with mental illness, opening up about her own struggles to reduce stigma and to improve understanding of the symptoms and options for treatment.
“We are all … a breath away from mental illness, homelessness, all of these things we tend to so look down on,” she said during a speech at a conference in Canada in 2006, The Globe and Mail reported. “We are all one human family and we really have to take care of each other,” she continued.
During her breakdown, the Canadian-born Kidder disappeared during a visit to Los Angeles. In a manic state, she threw away her purse because she believed there was a bomb in it and imagined her ex-husband was a CIA chief who was intent on killing her, as Kidder later told People.
She spent four days wandering from one place in the city to the other, she told People. She recalled how she was taken in by a homeless man named Charlie, who fed her and gave her a place to sleep in a homeless encampment under a freeway overpass. She has said that another homeless man tried to rape her and knocked out some of her dental work. She eventually turned up in someone’s back yard, telling the homeowner, “I may not look like it, but I’m Margot Kidder.”
Kidder was taken by the Los Angeles police to a hospital and then was placed in psychiatric care.
Several months later, she revealed her diagnosis to People. In advocating for people with mental illness, she also took an unconventional approach by touting therapies other than pharmaceuticals for treating symptoms of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other mental health disorders.
It is not yet known what Kidder died from. Police were called to her home in Livingston, Montana, on a report that she was “unconscious and not breathing.” The Daily Mail reported she had been ill; she said she had been “in bed with the flu” when she called into a radio show last week. Her death is under investigation but foul play is not suspected.
Prior to her 1996 “freak-out,” Kidder had become known as much for her “acting out” as for her acting, People said. The magazine described reports about her “addictions and recoveries, husbands and divorces” and “a stable of boyfriends,” including “Superman III” costar Richard Pryor, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and directors Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma. There also were episodes of bizarre behavior, and an auto accident that left her bankrupt and partially paralyzed, People added.
But following her 1996 breakdown, she began to recover her mental health. She later said she had long lived free of any manic episodes, according to the Daily Mail.
She also returned to acting, finding steady work in independent films, in television and on stage.
In 2001, she played the abusive mother of a serial killer on an episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” The next year, she appeared on Broadway in “The Vagina Monologues” and toured with the show for two years. She even briefly returned to the Superman saga by appearing in two episodes of the TV show “Smallville.” In 2015, she won an Emmy Award for outstanding performer in children’s programming for her performance in R.L. Stine’s “The Haunting Hour.”
Beyond her acting and mental-health advocacy, Kidder also was a vocal political activist on behalf of progressive and Democratic causes, Vanity Fair reported. She became a U.S. citizen in 2005 so she could vote in this country and continue her protest against the U.S. intervention in Iraq without fears of being departed. In 2011, she was arrested outside of the White House for protesting against the Keystone XL pipeline.
During the 2016 presidential race, she threw her support behind Bernie Sanders. At a May 2016 Sanders rally in Billings, Montana, she delighted in the political activism of millennials, according to the Billings Gazette.
“They are a quarter of the population,” Kidder told the crowd. “They care about the issues — climate change, student debt, income inequality — and you can’t fool them. They’ll fact-check you in a second. They’re active, involved, committed and educated. And they don’t care that Bernie Sanders is 74 years old. I think that’s delicious.”
