Barbara Walters, the American journalist and television personality famous for breaking barriers in her career and for her unusual interviews, shared a birthday with Christopher Reeve, the American actor best known for playing Superman. In 2003, Walters was the first to have Reeve in an interview after the accident that changed his whole life
Walters, born in 1929 in Boston, was the first woman to co-host the Today show and the first to co-anchor an evening network news program.
After graduating, Walters worked in an advertising agency before becoming an assistant to the publicity director at NBC, where she gained experience in writing and producing for television.
With this experience, CBS hired her as a news and public affairs producer and writer, and soon after she became a writer for the NBC morning show Today and had some on-air spots.
In 1976, Walters signed a five-year contract with ABC, becoming the first woman to co-anchor an evening network news program, with a salary of $1 million per year, the highest at the time.
Two years later, Walters left the program, and the following year she joined the ABC newsmagazine show 20/20 until 2004.
Walters died on December 30, 2022, at age 93, at her home in New York.
Reeve, born in 1952 in New York, was first known for his role as Superman. At 16, Reeve got his first job at the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center in Boston, where he was paid only $440 for 11 weeks of work.
“Pretty soon I realized I was committed to this, I felt it was something I could do that nobody else was doing, the way kids look for some kind of experience that sets them apart from the group.” Reeve once said
In 1978, Reeve made his movie debut in the movie Gray Lady Down. Later that year, he got the role of Superman. The first problem Reeve faced in this role was that director Richard Donner thought he was too skinny to play Superman, so after the cast, Reeve started exercising and gained around 30 pounds of muscle.
After a fall from a horse during an equestrian competition in 1995, Reeve broke his neck, which left him with quadriplegia. One year after Reeve returned to acting in A Step Toward Tomorrow, and that same year, he narrated the HBO documentary special Without Pity: A Film About Abilities.
Walters interviewed Reeve several times after the accident, and Reeve fought not only for his own recovery, but to raise awareness of spinal cord injuries and to call for stem cell research.
In 2003, and for the first time after the accident, Reeve talked to Walters about how he was able to breathe without his ventilator for hours at a time.
“Did you ever think this would happen? Did you ever think that you’d be off your ventilator?” Walters asked during the 20/20 interview.
“Because a spinal cord injury affects every system in the body,” he said. “So the more and more that you can get some systems back … like the ability to breathe as normal … just makes you feel that you’re moving forward.”
After receiving treatment for an infected ulcer, Reeve died from cardiac failure on October 10, 2004. He was 52.
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