What happened to the cast of “Superman”? Inside the lives of Christopher Reeve and his costars Jesse HassengerSun, August 30, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC 0 The (mostly human) staff of 'The Daily Planet,' including Perry White, Lois Lane, and Clark KentCredit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy Everett Collection It might be hard to picture these days, when even a “light” superhero year still means three or four massivebudget DC or Marvel adaptations.
What happened to the cast of “Superman”? Inside the lives of Christopher Reeve and his costars
Jesse HassengerSun, August 30, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC
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The (mostly human) staff of 'The Daily Planet,' including Perry White, Lois Lane, and Clark KentCredit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy Everett Collection
It might be hard to picture these days, when even a “light” superhero year still means three or four massive-budget DC or Marvel adaptations. But there was a time when comic-book heroes appeared on movie screens only sparingly — particularly between the waning days of old serials and the premiere of Superman in 1978.
Superman was advertised as a movie that would allow audiences to believe a man could fly, and they did. It was the second-biggest box-office hit of the year. It also set the big-screen template for superhero origin stories. The film follows Superman’s entire backstory, from his brief time as a newborn on the dying planet Krypton to his discovery on Earth by a kindly couple and upbringing as a not-so-ordinary Kansas farm boy.
As an adult, Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve) sets out for the big city of Metropolis, where he lives a double life as a bumbling newspaper reporter and a costumed hero fighting for justice. He crosses paths with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), who becomes his great love, and Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who becomes his great enemy.
It’s a lot of movie. Accordingly, it employed a large cast made up of Hollywood legends, veteran character actors, and relative newcomers. It’s a movie people still watch and revere nearly 50 years later, even after multiple additional iterations of Superman (and countless other crimefighters) have come and gone.
Let’s take a look at what the cast members got up to in the years before and after Superman launched the superhero movie genre for good.
01 of 06
Christopher Reeve (Clark Kent/Superman)
Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel / Reeve at a gala for his Paralysis Foundation in 2003Credit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy Everett Collection; Dimitrios Kambouris/WireImage
Apologies to David Corenswet and Henry Cavill, but Christopher Reeve is still considered the definitive onscreen Superman.
Stars as big and ill-fitting as Robert Redford, Sylvester Stallone, Paul Newman, and Burt Reynolds were supposedly in the mix. They all either turned it down or struck director Richard Donner as the wrong fit.
Enter Reeve, who was only 24 when filming began, with a sparse screen resume. He spent most of his early career as a stage actor while also appearing on the soap opera Love of Life.
The role is ostensibly two-in-one, and Reeve mastered both: He was able to play the stoic, boy-scout decency of Superman as well as the rom-com bumbling of Clark Kent. (In Reeve’s interpretation, Clark’s goofiness is part of his human disguise.)
The one-two punch of Superman and Superman II (1980) catapulted the then-unknown Reeve to stardom. He stuck with the role for a full decade, though Superman III (1983) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) earned poor reviews and diminished box office.
His other 1980s work didn’t reach superheroic heights, but several titles have since developed stronger followings, especially Somewhere in Time (1980), a time-travel romance with Jane Seymour.
He also worked with Michael Caine in Sidney Lumet’s twisty, darkly comic Deathtrap (1982) and headlined the crime drama Street Smart (1987), alongside Morgan Freeman’s Oscar-nominated supporting performance.
Two of his most successful non-Superman films were literary adaptations by the Merchant-Ivory team: The Bostonians (1984) and The Remains of the Day (1993). Reeve also continued to perform on stage.
In 1995, Reeve, a longtime equestrian, had a riding accident that paralyzed him from the neck down, leaving him unable to breathe without a ventilator and changing his life forever. Eventually, he was able to breathe on his own for increasing stretches of time. After years of rehabilitation, he regained some small movement and sensation in various parts of his body.
The actor became a disability activist. He continued to act occasionally, including a Golden Globe-nominated performance in a TV remake of Rear Window. His full-circle final onscreen role was a two-episode guest appearance on Smallville.
A series of complications led to Reeve’s death in 2004. He was survived by his son Matthew and daughter Alexandra, from a long-term relationship with Gae Exton; his wife Dana Morosini, whom he married in 1992; and their son Will.
02 of 06
Margot Kidder (Lois Lane)
Margot Kidder taking flying lessons as Lois Lane / Kidder at Philadelphia Comic Con in 2011Credit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy Everett Collection; Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic
Lois Lane was the worldly and cynical big-city reporter to Clark Kent’s Kansas-raised idealist. Margot Kidder’s onscreen experience compared with Reeve's reflected that dynamic, too. She was four years older and had already starred in Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973) and the now-classic slasher Black Christmas (1974).
Following Superman, she scored another major box-office success with The Amityville Horror (1979).
Aside from her long-term role as Lois Lane, however, Kidder’s movie-star career got much rockier in subsequent years. The Canadian actress returned to her native country for Heartaches (1981), alongside Annie Potts, and Patricia Rozema’s White Room (1990), but her work in the ’80s and ’90s was in general a mix of small parts, obscurities, and TV movies.
In 1990, she was involved in a car accident that left her with a serious spinal cord injury. Then there was a very public manic episode in 1996, which was related to bipolar disorder.
Amid her personal struggles, she continued to work, including a role in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (2009) that called back to her scream-queen roots. She also remained close with Reeve for the rest of his life.
Kidder died in 2018 at age 69.
03 of 06
Gene Hackman (Lex Luthor)
Gene Hackman dressed to the nines as Lex Luthor / Hackman at the Golden Globes in 2003Credit: Warner Bros.; Kevin Winter/Getty
Like Jack Nicholson in Batman years later, Gene Hackman was billed above the lead hero for the first two Superman movies. That didn’t feel especially unfair even years later, given Hackman’s legendary and enduring status in Hollywood.
He was, of course, Superman’s nemesis, Lex Luthor. His (and Donner’s) take on the character was loosely comic but no less menacing. A real-estate huckster for the late ’70s, sure, but one with an arrogant and uncompromising cruelty.
By that point, Hackman had established himself as part of a dynamic new generation of American actors and less traditional movie stars. He broke through with a supporting turn in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and went on to win the Best Actor Oscar as a relentless cop in The French Connection (1971).
Though not all of his ‘70s movies were major hits at the time, he made now-acknowledged classics like Scarecrow(1973), with Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and the bleak neo-noir Night Moves (1975). That’s to say nothing of his scene-stealing part as the blind man in Young Frankenstein (1974).
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The actor became even more of a Hollywood workhorse as the years went on, including starring roles in Hoosiers (1986) and Mississippi Burning (1988) and supporting work in Reds (1981) and No Way Out (1987). He won his second Oscar for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and rattled off such varied ’90s classics as Crimson Tide (1995), Get Shorty (1995), The Quick and the Dead (1995), and The Birdcage (1996).
Other high-profile work includes The Firm (1993), Absolute Power (1997), and Enemy of the State (1998).
He had a great one-two punch late in his career with 2001's Heist and The Royal Tenenbaums, for which he won his third career Golden Globe. Though he stepped away from public life, he occasionally emerged to promote his novels.
He and his second wife Betsy Arakawa, whom he married in 1991, both died in 2025. Hackman was 95.
04 of 06
Marlon Brando (Jor-El)
Marlon Brando as Jor-El / Brando in Los Angeles in 1990Credit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy Everett Collection; Vinnie Zuffante/Getty
One titan of cinema apparently wasn’t enough for Superman; in addition to Hackman, producers managed to wrangle screen legend Marlon Brando to play Jor-El, the Man of Steel’s father on Krypton.
Brando rose to prominence more than 25 years earlier as one of the most exciting young actors of the 1950s, winning attention for his committed work in film adaptations of plays including A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Julius Caesar (1953).
He won his first Best Actor Oscar for On the Waterfront (1954) and went on to star in the Oscar-winning Sayonara (1957), Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1960), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and his own directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks (1961).
His career suffered setbacks in the '60s, but he mounted a historic comeback thanks to his role as Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972), for which he won his second Academy Award for Best Actor, and Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972). While he remained selective in his choices, the afterglow of his return to prominence also included The Missouri Breaks (1976), Apocalypse Now (1979), and, of course, Superman.
Still, his up-and-coming costar suggested he wasn’t exactly giving the part his full attention. Appearing on David Letterman’s show in 1982, Reeve was forthright in his assessment: “People thought he was this institution no matter what he did. So he doesn’t care anymore.”
Pressed about whether it was exciting to work with him anyway, Reeve didn’t mince words: “Not really, no. He took the two million and ran.”
The Nebraska native maintained a reputation for being difficult for much of his career, and had a famously contentious relationship with the spotlight and his own line of work. He worked sparingly throughout the '80s and '90s, but he did land one last Oscar nomination for A Dry White Season (1989). His final onscreen role was The Score (2001), opposite Robert De Niro and Edward Norton.
Plagued by health issues in his later years, Brando died in 2004 at age 80.
05 of 06
Ned Beatty (Otis)
Ned Beatty as Otis / Beatty at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2013Credit: Warner Bros./ Courtesy Everett Collection; Michael Buckner/WireImage
Ned Beatty came to the role of Otis, Lex Luthor’s bumbling henchman, as part of an astonishing 1970s run as a clutch supporting player.
He rarely played leading roles, but after beginning his film career with the intense thriller Deliverance (1972), he had roles in '70s classics like Nashville (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), and Network (1976), for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
The Kentucky native remained in high demand for the rest of his career. After appearing in John Huston’s adaptation of Wise Blood (1979) and Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), Beatty popped up in everything from Stroker Ace (1983) to Back to School (1986) to The Big Easy (1986). He even reunited with Reeve for the star-studded Switching Channels (1988).
His prominent later work included Rudy (1993), He Got Game (1998), Cookie’s Fortune (1999), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), and Rampart (2011). Let's not forget his voice work — of the villainous sort, in particular. In addition to his Noah Cross-esque antagonist in Rango (2011), he was the now-iconic Lots-o-Huggin Bear in Toy Story 3 (2010), giving him one last Best Picture-nominated film for his résumé.
Beatty died in 2021 at age 83, leaving behind eight children from his first three marriages. He remained married to Sandra Johnson, his fourth wife, from 1999 until his death.
06 of 06
Jackie Cooper (Perry White)
Jackie Cooper as Perry White / Cooper in Beverly Hills in 1991Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty / Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty
Much of Jackie Cooper’s major work came long before he was cast as Daily Planet editor Perry White in his mid-50s. He was a child star as one of the leads in the Our Gang short comedies of the '20s and '30s.
While working on that series, he became the youngest-ever Best Actor Oscar nominee for Skippy (1931). The kid went on to star as Jim Hawkins in a film version of Treasure Island (1934) and stayed in regular demand for the next several years.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Cooper pivoted primarily to television. In addition to a pair of 1950s sitcom roles and frequent guest appearances, Cooper was a VP of program development for Columbia’s Screen Gems shingle from 1964 to 1969.
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By the time he assumed the role of newsman Perry White, Cooper was acting only occasionally, devoting more of his time to directing TV movies. In fact, he appeared in only one non-Superman movie after 1978: the comedy Surrender (1987), with Michael Caine and Sally Field.
The six-decade veteran announced his retirement from acting in 1989. He remained close to the Superman world, however, continuing to direct episodes of the TV series Superboy.
Cooper died in 2011 at age 88.
Where can I watch Superman?
Superman is currently available to stream on HBO Max.
on Entertainment Weekly
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Source: Entertainment
Published: August 30, 2026 at 10:46PM on Source: ALPHA MAG
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What happened to the cast of “Superman”? Inside the lives of Christopher Reeve and his costars Jesse HassengerSun, August 30, 20...
