“I don't know if when she dies I want to be remembered primarily as a woman who lusted after a man who dressed in blue stockings and red underpants on top. I hope there's something else." Behind enormous red-framed glasses, her hair up and a lucidity very similar to the one she gave to her Lois Lane, Margot Kidder was already trying in 1986 to shake off the suit of the brilliant journalist who with her intelligence and charm made Superman fall in love to stop somewhere else.
Sitting in the false living room of a television set and with the journalist Terry Wogan in front of her, somewhat more aggressive than usual, the actress triggered a concern that was as atrocious as it was accurate: over the years, she became the reference immediate Lois Lane but also in one of the saddest stories of the most promising generation of Hollywood, that of the 70s.
Margaret Ruth Kidder was the second of five children and was born on October 17, 1948, in Yellowknife, a mining area located in northern Canada, far removed from the lights of the cinema. The daughter of a history teacher and an engineer and explosives expert, her childhood was eventful, to say the least: she grew up in a dozen different towns, went through eleven schools, was never able to have a friend, and was fully immersed in the stories that He proposed literature. In addition, she lived with a mental illness swept under the rug that she managed to put into words many years later. Without television or access to the big screen, she got to know the cinema through the magazines that the pilots who traveled to that area brought as a form of entertainment. "My mother forbade me to read them, so she would hide the magazines under my bed and think 'I want to be a movie actress when I grow up,'" she told in 2012.
In addition to a genuine desire, acting served as an outlet for Kidder. After some modeling and acting jobs in Toronto, in 1971 she moved to Los Angeles to star with James Garner in the television series Nichols, an offbeat turn-of-the-century western. Although canceled after one season, the show firmly established her in Hollywood. What came next was a trip full of hallucinations, parties full of aspiring stars, drugs, rock & roll, and also free. Peter Biskind was commissioned to reconstruct several of the scenes from those turbulent times in a 1970s Hollywood chronicle which he titled Quiet Bikers, Wild Bulls.
Wild, intrepid, and risk-taking, Kidder made the perfect hostess in the apartment she shared with her colleague Jennifer Salt. Characters like John Milius or Richard Dreyfuss would go there to let themselves go without worrying about inquisitive glances and also to plan a future away from the establishment. “We were not going to be part of the system, we were going to make movies with a message, whether personal or political,” Kidder explained, as published by the ABC newspaper in Spain in an interview with Biskind in 1993. Meanwhile, the actress dedicated herself to experimentation
“Kidder was S- aggressive, not to mention voracious, and she slept with almost every man who walked through the house. Impulsive, she did not think about the consequences of her actions, and went from crisis to crisis, wrapped in dark clouds of bewilderment. She would break hearts and sue producers,” Biskind wrote. In an interview published by Rolling Stone magazine, Judson Klinger described her as an adventurous woman, predominantly vulnerable, with a tendency to live by impulsive or romantic decisions and at times unable to separate her life from her characters. "Listen, I've never done anything in moderation in my life," she blurted out after going over some striking anecdotes. “I have always been addicted to excess. I mean, this whole concept of restraint is something that I look forward to.”
