Christopher Reeve's son Will revealed People's Magazine Ahead of the release of the upcoming documentary “Superman: The Christopher Reeve Story,” Robin Williams was the first person to visit his father in the hospital after Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down. Williams also managed to make Reeve laugh for the first time since the accident by pretending to be a Russian proctologist.
“Robin was my dad's best friend, and you have to show up to your friends,” Will said, adding that Williams and Reeve called each other “brother.”
“There was a unique relationship between our father and Robin,” Will added. “They had a friendship that deserved a movie, but what stood out in that friendship was their love and respect for each other, and that love and respect never wavered… No one was better at showing love and just the right amount of humor than Robin Williams and his wife, Marsha, who we call our fairy godmother. We are still incredibly close to her.”
Williams and Reeve first met in the early 1970s when they were both studying theater at the Juilliard School. The “Superman” icon wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Still Me,” about meeting Williams for the first time.
“He wore brightly colored tie-dyed shirts with sweatpants, and he talked very quickly,” Reeve wrote. “He was like an untied balloon that had been inflated and released immediately. I watched in awe as he flew off the walls of classrooms and hallways. To say he was ‘at his best’ would be an understatement.”
“Superman: The Christopher Reeve Story,” a documentary that premiered at Sundance and hits theaters later this month, traces the late actor’s rise to stardom as Superman, as well as his struggle to find a cure for his spinal cord injuries after he became a quadriplegic following a horse-riding accident. Reeve’s family helped make the documentary, which includes personal archival material.
“It's a gift. We're very lucky,” said Will's brother, Matthew Reeve. diverse “At Sundance, we not only see his films, but we also see a collection of home movies that can be searched and reviewed, as well as interviews with him on YouTube. Seeing things I had never seen before didn’t change my perception of him, it reinforced it… like some rare Australian interviews from 1977 that were uploaded that I didn’t know existed. It was great to see that and discover more material that we didn’t know about.”
“Super/Man” will open in select theaters on September 21, followed by an additional screening on Reeve’s birthday, September 25.
