Robin Williams Was Christopher Reeve’s First Hospital Visitor After Accident & Made Him Laugh With This Weird Joke
Superman star Christopher Reeve‘s career was cut short in 1995, when he was involved in a horse-riding accident that resulted in his becoming paralyzed from the neck down — an injury so severe that he wondered if there was a point to carrying on. But the love and support of his wife Dana Reeve and his family gave him the strength to keep going for another nine years — a story that is being told in the new documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which will hit select theaters on Sept. 21, 2024.
In the film, Christopher’s son Will Reeve, who was only about 12 years old when his father died, opened up about the first person to visit his dad in the hospital after his accident: none other than actor and comedian Robin Williams.
D. Morrison/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Will explained, “Robin was Dad’s best friend, and you show up for your friends. Our dad and Robin had a singular bond,” formed in the 1970s, when both men were theater students at Juilliard. “They had a friendship that someone should make a movie about, but what shone through in that was just their love and respect for each other, and that never wavered. … No one was better at showing up with love and with the right dose of humor than Robin Williams and his wife Marsha, who we call our fairy godmother. We are still so incredibly close with her.”
CBS via Getty Images
Will added that Williams was the first person to make Reeve laugh in the hospital by pretending to be a Russian proctologist. As Reeve wrote in his memoir, 1998’s Still Me, about that day, “As the day of the operation drew closer, it became more and more painful and frightening to contemplate. In spite of efforts to protect me from the truth, I already knew that I had only a 50-50 chance of surviving the surgery. I lay on my back, frozen, unable to avoid thinking the darkest thoughts.”
Evan Agostini/Getty Images
He continued, “Then, at an especially bleak moment, the door flew open and in hurried a squat fellow with a blue scrub hat and a yellow surgical gown and glasses, speaking in a Russian accent. He announced that he was my proctologist and that he had to examine me immediately. My first reaction was that either I was on way too many drugs or I was in fact brain damaged. But it was Robin Williams. He and his wife, Marsha, had materialized from who knows where. And for the first time since the accident, I laughed. My old friend had helped me know that somehow I was going to be OK.”
Remind 
1980s Top Summer Blockbusters
July 2019
Celebrate the biggest summer movies of the ’80s, when moviegoing morphed from mere entertainment to blockbuster events.
Buy This Issue