Margot Kidder, who has died aged 69, will be remembered best for one defining performance. It’s her sterling and witty turn as Lois Lane in the Christopher Reeve-led Superman movies of the late 70s and early 80s, in which she was every inch Clark Kent’s equal in wit and moxie, if not in Kryptonite superpowers – and which set the standard for any other actor playing the role since.
If one neglects to dig more deeply into her fascinating life, then column inches will also be dominated by a bout of depression in 1996, when she was found wandering confusedly in a Los Angeles backyard after a four-day disappearance, having lost the caps of her teeth after an apparent rape attempt. She immediately sought treatment for her bipolar disorder and by her own account, in 2016, she never endured another episode.
But in an earlier incarnation, Kidder, an itinerant blue-collar Canadian kid born in remote and frigid Yellowknife to an engineer father and a schoolteacher mother, was there at the dawn of the era of the Hollywood movie brats in the early 1970s. It was at her infamous beach house north of Malibu – shared with fellow actor Jennifer Salt – that a number of crucial meetings occurred between some of the figures, mostly male, who remade Hollywood film-making in their own movie-crazy image during what is now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. There it was, in a cloud of pot smoke that later segued into a blizzard of cocaine, that Brian De Palma met Steven Spielberg, where Martin Scorsese met Paul Schrader, and where on any given day one might spy Scorsese sitting fully-clothed on the beach watching macho man John Milius surfing the waves alongside the skinny-dipping Kidder, Salt and Janet Margolin, as Spielberg repeatedly refused all offers of joints and coke straws.
It was, as Spielberg later related to Peter Biskind in Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, “a little bit of Woodstock on Nicholas Beach Road”. If Salt was its calm center, then Kidder was its wild child, hilariously witty and smart as a whip. “There was a Frances Farmer quality about her,” wrote Biskind, “and she struck her friends as not altogether stable.” Their neighbors were the Didion-Dunnes along the beach, Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow, and Michael and Julia Phillips, who would later produce landmark movies for Scorsese (Taxi Driver) and Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
There one might bump into, alongside the movie-geek insurgents of the coming revolution, figures like actors Bruce Dern, Jill Clayburgh, Peter Boyle and Richard Dreyfuss, writer-directors Walter Hill and John Landis, actor-producer Tony Bill and a rotating cast of pushers, producers and aspirant screenwriters. This was before they attained Oscars and honors and entered the Hollywood pantheon, when Spielberg was still an overgrown teenager who could barely dress himself, Scorsese was bloated by the cortisone he took for his asthma, Schrader was still a confused misogynist, De Palma was still plausible as a studly cocksman counting the notches on his bedpost, and Milius was still the over-the-top blowhard-surfer-raconteur he remains to this day.
Kidder’s moment in the sun began on Christmas 1971, when De Palma left the scripts for Sisters and The Phantom of the Paradise gift-wrapped under the Christmas tree for Kidder and Salt to read. The pair were both cast in Sisters. Kidder played conjoined twins, one of whom is given to murderous rages. Hitherto Kidder had played small roles in TV shows like Janacek and Harry O, and in forgotten movies like Quackser Fortune has a Cousin in the Bronx. Thereafter she became one of the more interesting and accomplished actors of the era, always with an enlivening dose of comic expertise. Her Lois Lane was straight-up screwball-comedienne gold dust, sweet-sour, quick-witted and sharp-tongued, reliable in a crunch and, with her arched eyebrows and odd beauty, the idol of every teenage comic book fan who laid eyes on her.
Her career choices were impulsive and not conducive to a lasting career at the top. She had starring roles in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud and The Great Waldo Pepper, and worked twice with writer-director Paul Mazursky. Later in life she admitted to Advocate magazine in 2008: “I’m not choosy at all. I’m the biggest whore on the block,” and she remained busy in small TV parts and guest roles (including alongside Reeve in two episodes of Smallville). She was always frank about the quality of the movies she made, calling one of her biggest hits, The Amityville Horror, “a piece of shit”.
Her most interesting roles seem to be in movies that are vanishingly obscure or almost forgotten, including 92 in the Shade and the Terrence Malick-scripted The Gravy Train, with Stacy Keach and Frederick Forrest. But as she grew older she spent less time on the screen and more time living. As she once said: “Acting’s fun, but life’s more important.”
