She went missing for four days and was discovered dirty, shoeless, and incoherent in a Glendale backyard. Several of her teeth had been removed – pulled out by Kidder herself, in a psychotic episode.
She later said she did it so she couldn’t be tracked through dental records.
“I was like one of those ladies you see yelling at the space aliens on the street corner,” she said. “There were days I just wanted to die.”
It was a far fall for the woman once hailed as the highest-paid Canadian actress of her generation. Kidder had become an icon after her performance opposite Reeve, giving Superman its emotional core as the plucky Daily Planet reporter.
But fame came fast and never sat easily with her. “Fame is weird, is what it really is,” she once said. “It’s the weirdest thing in the world.”
Born in 1948 in Yellowknife, in Canada’s remote Northwest Territories, Kidder’s father was a mining engineer, her mother a history teacher. A trip to New York aged 12, where she saw Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway, sparked her desire for a different life.
“That was it. I knew I had to go far away,” she later said.
She became part of a freewheeling, drug-fueled Hollywood scene in the early 1970s, sharing a home with actress Jennifer Salt.
The house became a haven for rising talents including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma, who cast her in Sisters.
