Dana Reeve, who won worldwide admiration for her devotion to her "Superman" husband, Christopher Reeve, through his decade of near-total paralysis, has died of lung cancer at the age of 44.
Reeve, a singer-actress who gave up some of her own career to be one of the nation's best-known caregivers, died late Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in New York, said Kathy Lewis, president of the Christopher Reeve Foundation.
Reeve had succeeded her husband as chairwoman of the foundation, which funded research into spinal-cord paralysis cures. She announced in August that, while she wasn't a smoker, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Lewis visited Reeve in the hospital Friday and said Reeve was "tired but with her typical sense of humor and smile, always trying to make other people feel good, her characteristic personality."
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Four months ago, at a fund-raising gala for the foundation, Reeve looked healthy in a long, formal gown and said she was responding well to treatment and her tumor was shrinking.
"I'm beating the odds and defying every statistic the doctors can throw at me," Reeve said then.
Asked how she kept her spirits up, Reeve said she "had a great model."
"I was married to a man who never gave up," she said.
She was still looking well on Jan. 13, when she sang Carole King's "Now and Forever" at Madison Square Garden during the retirement ceremony for Mark Messier's New York Rangers jersey.
Christopher Reeve, star of Hollywood's "Superman" movies, became an activist for spinal-cord research after a horse-riding accident paralyzed him in 1995. He died in October 2004.
The couple had a 13-year-old son, Will, and Dana Reeve had two grown stepchildren, Matthew and Alexandra.
