Christopher Reeve^†

Casting directors repeatedly dismissed him before he even got a screen test. The producers of Superman (1978) wanted a star, not an unknown 24-year-old from Juilliard, but casting director Lynn Stalmaster kept putting Reeve's headshot back on top of the pile. He finally got his shot and refused the muscle suit they offered him, choosing instead to spend months training under David Prowse and gaining 30 pounds of muscle. That stubbornness paid off. He played both Clark Kent and Superman so convincingly that audiences accepted the film's central absurdity without question.

The 1995 fall at an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia, shattered his first and second cervical vertebrae and left him paralyzed from the neck down, breathing on a ventilator. He spent the next nine years lobbying Congress, challenging the Bush administration's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, and fundraising relentlessly. His foundation gave out more than $42.5 million to neuroscientists. His advocacy made spinal cord research a 2004 presidential campaign issue, with John Kerry reportedly invoking his name. The career as Superman was a decade behind him when the accident happened, but the second act turned out to carry more weight.

At Juilliard in 1973, roughly 2,000 students auditioned for 20 spots. Reeve and Robin Williams were the only two accepted into the Advanced Program, meaning some of their classes had exactly two students. Williams later recalled that Reeve used to share food with him when his student loan hadn't come through yet. After the 1995 accident, Williams was the first friend to visit and showed up in disguise as a Russian gynecologist, which made Reeve laugh for the first time since the fall. Reeve wrote that the laugh told him he was going to survive. Outside acting, he piloted his own plane and would fly Williams out for weekends during film shoots.

Dana Reeve was performing in Brooklyn Boy in California when she rushed back to his bedside after he went into cardiac arrest on October 9, 2004. He died the following day at Northern Westchester Hospital. Dana took over the foundation chair and continued his advocacy until her own death from lung cancer in March 2006. The foundation was renamed the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation in 2007, and President Obama signed the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act in March 2009.