Dana Reeve, a singer and actress who married “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve and raised millions for medical research after her husband was paralyzed when he was thrown from a horse, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center. She was 44.

She died seven months after announcing she had been diagnosed with lung cancer; ironically, she never smoked.

In his struggles to work and regain mobility, Christopher Reeve became an inspirational figure to the severely disabled. Dana Reeve she supported his recovery efforts; he was unable to breathe without a respirator because of spinal cord damage. The causes he embraced, including stem-cell research and other potential treatment paths for paralysis, became hers.

Through the New Jersey-based Christopher Reeve Foundation the Reeves helped raise about $60 million in research funds for neuroscientists.

When Christopher Reeve died in October 2004, at age 52, his widow assumed the chairmanship of the foundation. She was credited with conceiving the foundation’s quality of life grants for victims of paralysis. She also compiled the book “Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve From Strangers and Other Friends” (1999).

Dana Reeve said she disliked sentimental press depictions of her husband’s fight to relearn even the most limited motor functions as well as her own efforts to help him.

The daughter of a cardiologist, Dana Morosini was born March 17, 1961, in Teaneck, N.J., and raised in Scarsdale. A budding actress, met Reeve in the 1987 at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre Festival when she was singing in a cabaret act. He found her immensely alluring, he wrote in a memoir, adding, “She wore an off-the-shoulder dress and sang ‘The Music That Makes Me Dance.'”

They lived together five years before marrying in 1992.

She acted in commercials and had occasional television roles on shows such as “Law and Order” and “Oz.” In 2000, she also co-hosted a daily talk show on the Lifetime network, “Lifetime Live,” with Deborah Roberts. She played a detective in the movie thriller “Above Suspicion” (1995), which starred her husband. In 2003, she quit Donald Margulies’s Broadway-bound drama “Brooklyn Boy” to be with her husband before he died.

She lived in Bedford, N.Y., in Westchester County, with her son from the marriage. Survivors also include two stepchildren from Christopher Reeve’s previous relationship with modeling executive Gae Exton; her father; and two sisters.