Christopher Reeve
Childhood Of Celebrities : Christopher Reeve
Reeve was born in New York City on September 25, 1952. His father, Franklin D’Olier Reeve, was a teacher, novelist, poet and scholar. He was a Princeton University graduate and, when Christopher was born, was studying for a master’s degree in Russian language at Columbia University. Franklin’s father, Colonel Richard Henry Reeve, had been the CEO of the Prudential Financial for over twenty-five years. Despite being born wealthy, Franklin Reeve spent summers working at the docks with longshoremen. Reeve’s mother, Barbara Pitney Lamb, a journalist, had been a student at Vassar College, but transferred to Barnard College to be closer to Franklin, whom she had met through a family connection. They had another son, Benjamin, born on October 6, 1953. Richard Henry Reeve was a descendant from a sister of Elias Boudinot, and also from Massachusetts governors Thomas Dudley and John Winthrop. Barbara Pitney Lamb was the granddaughter of Mahlon Pitney, a US Supreme Court Justice, and was also a descendant of William Bradford, a Mayflower passenger.
Franklin Reeve’s interests in socialism and English language and literature became increasingly important to him, and he and Barbara divorced in 1956. She moved with her two sons to Princeton, New Jersey, where they attended Nassau Street School. Franklin Reeve married Helen Schmidinger in 1956, a Columbia University graduate student. Barbara Pitney Lamb married Tristam B. Johnson, a stockbroker, in 1959. Johnson had Christopher and his brother, Benjamin, enroll in Princeton Country Day, a private school. Reeve was one of the few kids to excel in both academics and sports; he was on the honor roll and played soccer, baseball, tennis and hockey. Reeve later admitted that he put pressure on himself to act older than he actually was in order to gain his father’s approval.
Reeve found his true passion in 1962 at age nine when an amateur group held tryouts for the play The Yeomen of the Guard, and he was cast; it was the first of many student plays that he would act in. In the summer of 1968, at age fifteen, Reeve was accepted as an apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The other apprentices were mostly college students, but Reeve’s older appearance and maturity helped him fit in. In a workshop, he played a scene from A View From The Bridge that was chosen to be presented in front of an audience. After the performance, actor Olympia Dukakis said to him, “I’m surprised. You’ve got a lot of talent. Don’t mess it up.” The next summer, Reeve was hired at the Harvard Summer Repertory Theater Company in Cambridge for $44 per week. He played a Russian sailor in The Hostage and Belyayev in A Month in the Country. Famed theater critic Elliot Norton called his performance as Belyayev “startlingly effective.” The 23-year-old lead actress in the play, a Carnegie Mellon graduate, turned out to be Reeve’s first romance. She was engaged to a fellow Carnegie Mellon graduate at the time; they mutually ended the relationship when he made a surprise visit to her dorm room at seven in the morning and found Reeve with her. Reeve’s romance with the actress fizzled a few months later when the age difference became an issue for them.
Credit : Wikipedia
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