Margot Kidder (1970-80s Lois Lane, Amityville Horror movies) 2018 Suicide

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Margot committed suicide in May 2018, a month before Bourdain & Spade.

Kidder had mental health issues from a young age, which stemmed from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. "I knew I was different, had these mind flights that other people didn't seem to have," she recalled. She was whip-smart and stunningly beautiful as a teenager. “I was a hot babe with teased hair and white lipstick,” she says. “My mom sent me to boarding school so I wouldn’t get raped by a miner.” At age 14, she attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of codeine capsules after her then-boyfriend broke up with her. Kidder found an outlet in acting as she felt she could "let my real self out... and no one would know it was me." "Nobody ever encouraged me to be an actress," she recalled. "It was taken as a joke ... As a teenager, I envisioned myself in every book I read. I wanted to be Henry Miller and Thomas Wolfe. I wanted to eat everything on the world's platter, but my eyes were bigger than my stomach." She attended multiple schools during her youth through her family's relocations, eventually graduating from Havergal College, a boarding school in Toronto, in 1966. In 1966, she found herself pregnant by her boyfriend, who arranged for an illegal abortion. The abortionist was located in a hotel room and filled Kidder's uterus with Lysol to terminate the pregnancy.

The magazine described reports about her “addictions and recoveries, husbands and divorces” and “a stable of boyfriends,” including “Superman III” costar Richard Pryor, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and directors Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma. There also were episodes of bizarre behavior, and an auto accident that left her bankrupt and partially paralyzed, People added.

The Missouri Breaks (1976)
In the summer of 1975, Kidder was hired to direct a documentary short chronicling the making of The Missouri Breaks (1976), a Western film starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. "I was such a jerk," she recalled. "I mean, I thought they wanted a real documentary. So I filmed all the behind-the-scenes rows and arguments and shot footage of the vet shooting up the horses with tranquilizers so the actors would look as if they rode well. What an idiot I was. Then when they fired me, I realized what they'd wanted was a publicity film."​

Amityville Horror (1979)
Margot - "What a piece of shit! I couldn’t believe that anyone would take that seriously. I was laughing my whole way through it, much to the annoyance of Rod Steiger, who took the whole thing very seriously. At the time, my agent proposed sort of a “one for me, one for them” policy. That was one for them." It was the crazy Christians who made it a hit. They wanted people to believe in the devil and possessions and haunted houses and all that hooey.​

Margot's Breakdown 1996
Kidder came to the conclusion that her first husband, novelist Thomas McGuane, “was trying to kill me.” She had divorced McGuane, who refused to speak to PEOPLE for this story, in 1977 after several turbulent years. (Afterward, Kidder was briefly married to actor John Heard and then to French director Philippe de Broca.) Disoriented and terrified, she returned to the L.A. airport on Saturday afternoon, April 20. Kidder was fixated on the idea that McGuane and the CIA were plotting to kill her because her book was powerful enough to change the world. Says manic-depression expert and author Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind), a Johns Hopkins University professor who has recently corresponded with Kidder: “Manic-depressives often become delusional in the manic phase. And their usual form is paranoia.” Kidder saw agents and assassins everywhere. “I know you’re looking at me!” she shouted at passersby at the airport.​
Still in the airport at 3 a.m., she hooked up with a TV crew from WBIR in Knoxville, Tenn. “My ex-husband has hired people to kill me,” she told them. Recalls anchorman Ted Hall, who recognized her: “I could see there was no plot. It was so sad. She was dirty, tired, no makeup.” By then, Kidder had thrown away her purse because she thought there was a bomb in it. In the early hours of April 21, she tried to take a taxi but didn’t have enough money for the trip. She tried to use her ATM card outside the airport but thought the cash machine was about to explode. “I took off running,” Kidder recalls. “I slept in yards and on porches in a state of fear.” By the afternoon of the 21st, Kidder had made her way downtown, a distance of some 20 miles, and was taken in by Charlie and another man. Says Kidder: “I tried to make little jokes about how to behave because I wasn’t from this neighborhood. The other man just looked at me and said, ‘None of us are from this neighborhood.'”​
In his cardboard shack, Charlie “took such incredible care of me,” says Kidder. “I was cold. I was hungry. I was terrified beyond belief. He stayed with me and held me.” Kidder had lost some caps on her front teeth that sometimes fell out and which she cemented back in place with Krazy Glue. “When you’re having a manic episode,” she says, “you don’t always remember to pack the Krazy Glue.” The next day another homeless man tried to r*pe Kidder, kicking her in the stomach, hitting her in the face and dislodging the last of the caps on her front teeth. Kidder hit back and remembers reasoning in desperation, “You’re a good person. You don’t want to do this.” The man backed off.​

Margot Kidder's death ruled a suicide
Kidder, who played Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve’s Superman, was found by a friend in her Montana home on 13 May. At the time Kidder’s manager, Camilla Fluxman Pines, said she had died peacefully in her sleep. Her daughter Maggie McGuane said on Wednesday that it was a “big relief” to have the truth out. “It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this.” A statement released on Wednesday by the Park county coroner Richard Wood said the star died from a self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose, and no further details would be released.​

McGuane urged people with mental illness to seek help. “It’s a very unique sort of grief and pain,” McGuane said. “Knowing how many families in this state go through this, I wish that I could reach out to each one of them.” Kidder dealt with mental illness for much of her life, while a 1990 car accident left her in debt and needing a wheelchair for almost two years. Kidder and Reeve starred in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987. She also appeared in The Great Waldo Pepper with Robert Redford in 1975, Brian De Palma’s Sisters in 1973 and The Amityville Horror in 1979. She later appeared in small films and television shows until 2017, including RL Stine’s The Haunting Hour. She received a Daytime Emmy Award as outstanding performer in a children’s series in 2015 for that role. Kidder, originally from Yellowknife, Canada, was a political activist who was arrested in 2011 in a Washington DC protest over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil sands.​
Joan Kesich, a longtime friend who found Kidder’s body, said she had been fearless and always spoke the truth, regardless of the consequences.​
“In her last months, she was herself – same kind of love, same kind of energy,” Kesich said. “The challenges that she had were very public. I want what I know about her to be out there because it was glorious. She was really a blazing energy.”​


Her brother spread her ashes on her property


Trudeau - Brian de Palma -



Brian de Palma movie Sisters
 
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