Margaret Ruth Kidder (born October 17, 1948 in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada), better known as Margot Kidder, is a popular and daring film actress who achieved her greatest fame in the 1970s and 1980s.

Television, film and theatre

Among her early roles was as the barmaid in Nichols, a short-lived James Garner vehicle made for American television. She appeared in a number of low budget Canadian movies in the early 1970's including the psychological thriller Sisters (1973) and the horror film Black Christmas (1974). She is best known for her role as Lois Lane in the 1978 movie Superman and its sequels. Kidder brought more depth to the role than previous actresses had done, portraying Lane as an ambitious and headstrong, yet vulnerable and emotionally lonely woman trying to make it in a man's world. After she publicly expressed her disgust to the producers, Alexander Salkind and Ilya Salkind, over the firing of Richard Donner from 1980's Superman II, her role in 1983's Superman III consisted of less than 5 minutes of footage. Her role in 1987's Superman IV: The Quest For Peace was much more substantial.

Aside from the Superman franchise, Kidder has also starred in The Amityville Horror, Willie and Phil, The Great Waldo Pepper, and Black Christmas. She has made uncredited cameo appearances in Maverick and Delirious. In 1983, Kidder produced and starred (as Eliza Doolittle) in the TV version of Pygmalion with Peter O'Toole. She has also done extensive stage work, including The Vagina Monologues.

In 2005 Kidder briefly returned to the Superman franchise in two episodes of the television program Smallville as Dr. Bridgette Crosby, an emissary of Dr. Swann (played by her Superman co-star Christopher Reeve).

Politics and nationality

Kidder raised some hackles in the early 1990s during the Gulf War, when she ridiculed the press and the military for not seeing the larger consequences of their actions. Despite the criticism, Kidder became a United States citizen on August 17, 2005, in Butte, Montana; she lives in nearby Livingston.

She said the reason for her decision to become an American citizen is to participate in the voting process, to continue her protests against U.S. intervention in Iraq and at the same time to be free of worries about being deported back to Canada.

Kidder has bipolar disorder which led to a widely publicized breakdown in 1996. She is now an advocate of orthomolecular medicine as a treatment for bipolar disorder. She also revealed publicly that she has had an abortion in the past.

Trivia

• An animated Kidder appears in an episode of the FOX Television series Family Guy entitled "Mr. Saturday Knight". In the episode, Kidder is dining with the Griffin family when she suddenly has a psychotic breakdown and keeps returning throughout the episode at random, wreaking more havoc.
• Kidder once dated former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
• She played the "Broken Skull" bartender on a PC adventure game featuring Tex Murphy in Under a Killing Moon.
• She has been married and divorced three times: to playwright Thomas McGuane (with whom she has a daughter, Maggie); to actor John Heard; and to Philippe de Broca. None of the marriages lasted longer than a year. Since her divorce from De Broca, she has said that she prefers the companionship of her dogs.
• Margot has a niece, who is also an actress, named Janet Kidder.
• A nude pictorial of Margot, photographed by Douglas Kirkland, was published in the March 1975 issue of Playboy. The accompanying article was written by Kidder.

Quotes

When asked to sum up her life, she responded, "I suppose that if you want to be famous and suddenly it happens and you don't like it, it's nobody's fault but your own."