Actors - Dana Reeve

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	Actors - Dana Reeve

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Dana Reeve (February 19 or March 17, 1961 – March 6, 2006) was an American actress and singer. She was a founding board member and chairperson of the Christopher Reeve Foundation.

Personal history

Reeve was born Dana Charles Morosini in Teaneck, New Jersey to Charles Morosini, a cardiologist, and Helen Simpson Morosini, who died in 2005.

She grew up in the town of Greenburgh, New York, where she attended Edgemont High School. She graduated cum laude in English Literature from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1984.

She spent the junior year of her studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England. She later pursued additional graduate studies in acting at the California Institute of the Arts. She and her husband received honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters from Middlebury in 2004.

She married actor Christopher Reeve in Williamstown in April 1992, and they had one child, William Elliot "Will" Reeve, born on June 7, 1992.

Activism

Reeve was thrust into a public role after her husband became a quadriplegic as a result of a horse riding accident in Culpeper, Virginia on May 27, 1995. Reeve then became a motivational speaker and activist for the quality of everyday life of the paralyzed and, after her husband's death, a proponent of the controversial human embryonic stem cell research. Reeve in an editorial she wrote in October 2005 confessed that "I still have my soft spot for the quality-of-life grant programs and for the resource center, because it’s really the people part. Chris used to be the visionary who went to Washington to lobby for funding, and I was the one who figured out, 'Is there a wheelchair ramp so that our family can get into this movie theater?' I thought if that’s hard for me, it’s got to be much harder for the majority of people out there." She emphasized care over cure in her philosophy.

In 1996, the Reeves founded the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which funds research on paralysis and works to improve the lives of the disabled. In 2005, the name changed from Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation to its pre-merger name of Christopher Reeve Foundation. It is not known if the name change was from a seperation from the American Paralysis Association which merged with the Christopher Reeve Foundation in 1999 or if it was just cosmetic. Both organization names are interchangable. To date, it has awarded more than $55 million (USD) in research grants and more than $8 million in quality-of-life grants.

After her husband's death on October 10, 2004, she assumed the role of chairperson of the organization. She also endorsed Senator John Kerry (D-MA) for president and introduced him before his speech on science and technology on October 21, 2004. She also was in Washington D.C. to hear President George W. Bush's State of the Union in the gallery as the guest of a New England Congressman on February 2, 2005 and again for a rally a couple months later.

Show business career

Her many singing and acting credits included appearances on television, where she had featured roles on Law & Order and All My Children, among others. She performed at theatres on Broadway, off-Broadway, and at numerous regional theatres. Reeve also did a long-running commerical for Tide laundry detergent that aired during the 1990s. Ironically in 1995 she had a cameo in the HBO movie Above Suspicion that starred her husband where she played a female detective that smoked.

In 2000 she co-hosted a live daily talk show for women on the Lifetime Network with Deborah Roberts called Lifetime Live and also wrote a brief column for the defunct AccessLife.com These articles can be found at the Christopher Reeve Homepage. She sang the title song on the soundtrack of the HBO drama, In the Gloaming directed by her husband. Reeve also had another cameo in her husband's movie "The Brooke Ellison Story" as a teacher.

Reeve also authored the 1999 book, Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends. She also wrote the Foreward to "Love Letters of a Lifetime", a book promoting the Lifetime television series of the same name. In 2004, she was performing in the Broadway-bound play Brooklyn Boy in Costa Mesa, California when she had to rush home to reach her husband's bedside after he went into cardiac arrest and a coma. In April 2005, it was also announced that she signed a seven-figure book deal with Penguin Books to write about her relationship with her famous husband. It is not known how far Reeve got with writing the book before she died or even if it is still coming out at its scheduled release. The children's book "Dewey Doo-it Helps Owlie Fly Again: A Musical Storybook Inspired by Christopher Reeve" also came out and included an audio with Mandy Patinkin reading the story as well as Reeve and Bernadette Peters singing to accompany the book.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Dana Reeve ]

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Actors - Dana Reeve

Personal history

Activism

Show business career

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