Margot Kidder Biography

Actress Margot Kidder played tough-but-tender reporter Lois Lane in four Superman movies of the 1970s and 1980s.

Margot Kidder was born in the remote city of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada. She graduated from Havergal College (a K-12 boarding school in Toronto) in 1966 and went straight into Canadian film and television. She starred opposite Gene Wilder in Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin In the Bronx (1970) and Robert Redford in The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) before landing her signature role in the 1978 big-budget epic Superman: The Movie.

Kidder’s Lois Lane was fast-talking and cynical but nonetheless fell for big lug Superman, played by Christopher Reeve. The film was a smash hit and spawned three sequels with Reeve and Kidder: Superman II (1980), Superman III (1984) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987).

Brown-haired and rugged but vulnerable, Kidder played rough-edged and struggling characters in in films like Heartaches (1981), Some Kind of Hero (1983, with Richard Pryor), and Little Treasure (1986, with Burt Lancaster). A 1990 auto accident left her wheelchair-bound during a long recovery, and 1996 she had a manic episode while visiting Los Angeles; after four days a resident found Kidder in her back yard and she was taken to psychiatric care. (She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1988.)

In later years Kidder appeared in a variety of TV guest spots and independent films, and toured for two years in a production of The Vagina Monologues. She died in her sleep in 2018 at age 69.