Christopher Reeve, who died at age 52 after contracting a blood infection, was the square-jawed, ramrod straight actor who shot to fame as star of the Superman movies, then turned a catastrophic accident into an inspirational and very public battle with quadriplegia.

It was a battle that Reeve lost, but not until he had brought new visibility to the plight of those bound to their wheelchairs for life. Reeve, who proclaimed his faith that he would one day walk again, made fund-raising appearances on behalf of his Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, which over the years gave out more than $40 million in research grants.

If his efforts were occasionally criticized for creating false hopes among the disabled, Reeve insisted that optimism was warranted – and therapeutic. “I don’t mean to be reckless,” he told the Associated Press. “But setting a goal that seems a bit daunting actually is very helpful toward recovery.

The 1995 accident that disabled Reeve – badly broken cervical vertebrae called by doctors a “hangman’s injury” – came at a time when the former Superman’s career had plateaued after a rapid ascent. If he never became a bankable megastar, it was largely because of his reluctance to participate in potential blockbusters. He instead preferred to appear in edgier, more literate films that had their roots in the stagecraft he had honed since his youth.

Reeve was born in Manhattan; after his parents split up, he grew up in Princeton, N.J. He described his bitterly estranged parents as having used him “like a chess piece,” and he sought escape in theater. Reeve appeared in his first production while in elementary school, and by the time he was a teenager, he was a regular performer at Princeton’s McCarter Theater. In high school he apprenticed at the Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts, beginning an association that would last for many years. Even after he had become a film star, Reeve would return to Williamstown to appear in repertory for a few hundred dollars a week.

Reeve continued to act professionally while attending Cornell – he was a member of Actor’s Equity by age 16. When he was a senior enrolled in the acting program at Juilliard, he studied under the fabled teacher John House man. In 1974, his sophomore year at Juilliard, he took a role on the CBS soap opera “Love of Life” as Ben Harper, a heartless bigamist. He soon began appearing in Off-Broadway productions, and in 1975 made his Broadway debut opposite Katherine Hepburn in “A Matter of Gravity.” Reviews of the play, which concerned self-levitation, were mixed. Reeve later said watching Hepburn gave him his “best unconscious acting lesson.” He continued to appear on stage, and began auditioning for films.

After an exhaustive search, the producers of “Superman” selected Reeve, who told the New York Post, “The part came to me because…I have the look. It’s 90 percent look. If I didn’t look like the guy in the comic book, I wouldn’t be here. The other 10 percent is acting talent.”

Despite this accurate assessment, critics were nearly unanimous that it was Reeve’s acting, along with co-stars Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman, that made the “Superman” films especially good, of their type. Wrote Jack Kroll in Newsweek, “Ridiculously good-looking, with a face as sharp and strong as an ax blade, his bumbling, fumbling Clark Kent and omnipotent Superman are simply two styles of gallantry and innocence.”

Reeve ended up making four “Superman” films, but always felt ambivalent about participating and sought to “escape the cape.” His other projects tended to be more aesthetically interesting. In 1980 he appeared in “Somewhere in Time,” a fantasy romance that continues to garner a cult audience. That summer, Reeve returned to Williamstown and appeared in “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Front Page,” and “The Heiress.” He then returned to Broadway, to star in Lanford Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” in which, spookily in retrospect, Reeve played a disabled Vietnam veteran. Reeve would continue for many years to juggle stage and screen projects, although he appeared on Broadway only once more, in the illfated “Marriage of Figaro,” in 1985.

His best film work tended to be in independent productions, such as “Death Trap” (1982), opposite Michael Caine, and Merchant-Ivory productions including “The Bostonians” (1984) and “The Remains of the Day (1993).

He owned an estate in Mount Kisco, N.Y., and maintained an active lifestyle, sailing in his yacht down to the Bahamas, piloting his own plane and glider, and riding horses competitively.

Within four months of his 1995 steeplechase accident, Reeve, still attached to a ventilator, was interviewed on “20/20” by Barbara Walters. At the Academy Awards the following March, he urged Hollywood to make more movies about social issues. “Let’s continue to take risks. Let’s tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else,” he said. Reeve wrote a memoir and was awarded a Grammy for his audio-book reading of it. Reeve criticized American health care and advocated catastrophic health insurance before the Senate, and spoke about the rights of the disabled at the United Nations.

Reeve occasionally wrote and directed for television, and even appeared in a new version of “Rear Window” (1988), the Hitchcock classic about a wheelchair-bound sleuth who suspects his neighbor of murder.

Reeve was willing – and had the means – to embrace expensive and experimental treatments. He spent hours exercising his legs on a treadmill with the help of attendants, hoping to recreate the neural pathways that had been destroyed when he broke his neck.

Reeve was also a vocal advocate of embryonic stem-cell research, which he and others hope might one day serve to create new neural connections. He criticized President Bush’s decision to limit federal funding to research on existing stem-cell lines.

At this year’s second presidential debate, Senator Kerry even mentioned Reeve: “I want him to walk again.”

Reeve assured friends that he would walk by his 50th birthday, and although he failed, he was able to breathe without a ventilator for extended periods, thanks to an experimental surgery in which tiny wires attached to electrodes were inserted into his diaphragm. It came almost as a miracle when he found, in 2000, that he was able to move his index finger. He eventually was able to move several appendages slightly; doctors told him recovery even on this scale was nearly unprecedented, and fed his optimism.

During the 2000 Super Bowl, Reeve was featured in an advertisement that portrayed him standing up from his wheelchair. It was a special-effects simulation, but it fooled a number of families into thinking some sort of cure for quadriplegia had been discovered. Reeve was criticized for inspiring false optimism among the disabled. Commentator Charles Krauthammer, himself wheelchair bound since his early 20s, wrote that “The newly paralyzed young might end up emulating Reeve, spending hours on end preparing their bodies to be ready to walk the day the miracle cure comes, much like the millenarians who abandon their homes and sell their worldly goods to await the Rapture on a mountaintop.”

Reeve, ever the optimist, responded, “It’s like the difference between looking at a blueprint and looking at a detailed model of a new house,” he said. “And you can imagine yourself living there.”

Christopher Reeve

Born September 25, 1952, at Manhattan; died October 10 of cardiac arrest brought on by infection at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco; survived by his wife, Dana Reeve; his children, Matthew, Alexandra, and Will; his mother and his father, and a brother, Benjamin Reeve.