The Horror of Margot Kidder

Margot Kidder (1948-2018) gave up the ghost just a few years ago, but if I saw more than just a headline, I don’t recall it. The country was neck deep in the shit storm of the 45th Presidency at the time; one had to deflect daily volleys of news items reporting his multiple daily attrocities, leaving little time or energy left over to track anything so apparently frivolous as celebrity news. We’ve had a couple of years to breathe, just barely, since then, and in about three weeks we’ll almost certainly be thrust back into a landscape of 24/7 wall-to-wall horror, so we now take this opportunity to explore her story a little, for I don’t believe it’s widely known.

Like most of the world, I first became aware of Margot Kidder from Superman: The Movie (1978). As I wrote in my earlier post, I didn’t care for her in the Superman films, in fact, I don’t like the casting of most of the characters in that series, including Christopher Reeve. For Lois Lane, or any classic gal reporter character, you should go with the original models, something in the Glenda Farrell or Rosalind Russell mold, but naturally updated. I read that Stockard Channing made the short list — she might have nailed it. I found Kidder awkward in the wrong ways, kind of dark and strange (for this character). One half wonders if she’s there because her name is Margot, evoking the equivalent character in The Shadow, Margo Lane.

My eyes were opened to her virtues much later, when I saw her in Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1975) in which she was funny and foul-mouthed, and easily the most entertaining person in the picture (which is impressive, given that one of her co-stars is a young Andrea Martin). Horror, I believe, was Kidder’s true metier. If not for the Superman diversion, we might otherwise regard her as one of the great modern scream queens. Her pictures in that vein include Brian Da Palma’s Sisters (1973), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), The Clown at Midnight (1999), Death 4 Told (2004), Halloween II (2009), and R.L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour (2014). I don’t know that horror was her “happy” place, per se, but it seemed like her natural one. She had that Goth cracker energy. She looks a little like she could be the daughter of Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of Lois Lane, I think I’d much prefer to have seen her play a Superman villainess.

I had already come to this conclusion before I knew the facts of Kidder’s offscreen life, which tell a story that matches what one sees onscreen, or what I see, at any rate. Kidder was a long-time sufferer of bipolar disorder, present from her teenage years, though not diagnosed until 1988. Intertwined with that were a long string of misfortunes, some clearly attributable to her condition, others merely bad luck. She attempted suicide when she was 14. Four years later, a boyfriend knocked her up, and she had an illegal abortion in an old hotel. According to an article in The Atlantic, Lysol was used to kill the fetus (who’s her gynecologist, Donald Trump?). She was married three times, in each case for less than a year; one of those marriages (to actor John Heard) was washed up in less than a week.

In 1990, Kidder was shooting an episode of her new TV series Nancy Drew and Daughter, when the car she was driving failed to brake, rolled over a couple of times and crashed into a telephone pole. She was partially paralyzed for two years. Just a few years later (1995), Reeve had his cataclysmic horseback riding accident. In 1996, Kidder’s laptop ate the autobiogrpahical manuscript she was working on. When the data could not be retrieved, she suffered a manic episode during which she vanished for four days before being located in somebody’s backyard. She’d hacked her hair off with a razor to disguise her identity, claiming people were trying to kill her. Caps were missing from her teeth. She may or may not have been attacked by homeless people during her ordeal. She was placed in a psychiatric facility. This was all widely publicized at the time, which was far from ideal for her career. And one does need to earn a living.

By 2005 Kidder, while still working in film and television, had moved to Montana where she became deeply involved in politics. Her mother, a school teacher, had been a socialist, and Kidder followed the tradition by being a committed leftist, and a big supporter of the democratic party and candidates like Bernie Sanders. She participated in the Standing Rock protests, which involved long weeks of camping outdoors during the winter of 2016-2017. She was 68 years old at the time; it likely took a toll on her health.

When Kidder passed away in 2018, it was initially reported that she had “died peacefully in her sleep”. But it was later ruled to have been a suicide via an overdose of drugs and alcohol. In addition to her mental illness, Kidder had also suffered money woes since the time of her 1990 accident (nearly 30 years earlier). Why is anyone in the grips of an infirmity having “money woes”? It seems to me the entirety of this society is in drastic need of remaking. Which makes Kidder’s early death a double loss, for it seems like she was working hard to make such a society.