LOS ANGELES (AP) — Margot Kidder, the Canadian actress who starred as a salty and cynical Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in the “Superman” film franchise of the 1970s and 1980s, has died. She was 69.
Kidder’s manager Camilla Fluxman Pines said she died peacefully in her sleep on Sunday. Police in Livingston, Montana, said in a statement that officers were called to Kidder‘s home, where they found her dead. An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause, but no foul play is suspected.
“Superman,” directed by Richard Donner and released in 1978, was a superhero blockbuster two decades before comic book movies became the norm at the top of the box office. Makers of today’s Marvel and D.C. films cite “Superman” as an essential inspiration.
Kidder, as ace reporter Lane, was a salty, sexually savvy adult who played off of the boyish, farm-raised charm of Reeve’s Clark Kent, though her dogged journalism constantly got her into dangerous scrapes that required old-fashioned rescues.
Kidder had many of the movies’ most memorable lines, including “You’ve got me?! Who’s got you?!” when she first encountered the costumed hero as she and a helicopter plunged from the top of a Metropolis building.
Kidder and Reeve were relative unknowns when they got their leading parts in the first of the films in 1978, which also included big names Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando.
Kidder and Reeve went on to star in three more “Superman” movies, the fourth and last in 1987.
Kidder also starred as conjoined twins in Brian De Palma’s 1973 “Sisters,” and as the mother of a terrorized family opposite James Brolin in 1979’s “The Amityville Horror.”
Kidder was married and divorced three times, including a brief marriage to actor John Heard, and is survived by a daughter, Maggie McGuane.
