In early June 1995, Christopher Reeve lay in an intensive care bed at the University of Virginia, unable to move or breathe on his own. The man the world knew as Superman was facing a surgery he might not survive. Then a stranger in hospital scrubs rushed through the door, speaking in a thick Russian accent, and changed the mood in that room for good. The stranger was Robin Williams, and the moment he produced was something Reeve had not managed since his accident: a laugh.
A few days that changed everything
On May 27, 1995, Reeve was competing in a riding event at Commonwealth Park in Culpeper, Virginia, when his horse balked at a jump and threw him forward. He landed on his head and broke the top two vertebrae in his neck, an injury so high on the spine that he could no longer breathe without a ventilator.
He was flown to the University of Virginia hospital in Charlottesville. When he woke up days later, the news was as bad as it gets. He was paralyzed from the neck down, and the operation to reattach his skull to his spinal column gave him roughly a fifty-fifty chance of living through it.
Reeve later admitted that in those first days he did not want to go on. He told his wife, Dana, that maybe they should let him go. Her answer, which he credited with saving his life, was simple:
“You’re still you. And I love you.”
He had chosen to keep fighting. But the surgery still loomed, and with it, the fear.
The “proctologist” who would not take no for an answer
In his 1998 memoir, Still Me, Reeve described the scene in detail. As the date of the operation drew closer, the waiting grew more painful and more frightening. He lay on his back, frozen in place, with nothing to do but think the worst.
Then, during one of the bleakest stretches, the door flew open. In hurried a short, stocky figure wearing a blue scrub hat, a yellow surgical gown and glasses. In a Russian accent, the man announced that he was Reeve’s proctologist and that the exam had to happen right away.
Reeve’s first reaction, he wrote, was that he must be on far too much medication, or that the accident had damaged his brain after all. Then he realized who was standing at the foot of his bed. It was Robin Williams, playing the part to the hilt.
And Christopher Reeve laughed. He wrote that it was the first time he had laughed since the fall, and that his old friend “had helped me know that somehow I was going to be okay.”
A doctor the public hadn’t met yet
The character was not invented on the spot. Reports on the visit have linked the bit to Dr. Kosevich, the bumbling Russian obstetrician Williams played in the comedy Nine Months. That film did not reach theaters until July 12, 1995, more than a month later. So the Russian doctor turned up in a Virginia intensive care unit before he ever turned up in a movie theater.
Why it was Robin who walked through that door
The two men had known each other for more than twenty years. In 1973, roughly two thousand hopefuls auditioned for twenty places in Juilliard’s freshman class. Reeve and Williams were the only two that year chosen by John Houseman for the school’s advanced program, which meant they often sat in classes where they were the only students. Reeve was the disciplined, classically minded one; Williams was the bundle of energy who could slip into any accent without trying. They became close friends anyway, and stayed that way through fame on both sides.
What happened next
Within days, Reeve went into surgery. Dr. John Jane, the hospital’s chief of neurosurgery, rebuilt the connection between Reeve’s skull and spine using wire, titanium and bone taken from his hip. Reeve survived it.
He lived nine more years, became one of the most visible advocates for spinal cord injury research in the world, and died in October 2004 at age 52. Through those years, Williams kept visiting and kept turning up for his friend’s foundation at event after event.
When Williams died in August 2014, the Reeve family released a statement recalling that hospital visit as the first time their father had truly laughed after the accident. Ten years later, Reeve’s son Will said Williams was the first friend to show up at the hospital at all, and explained it in one line:
“Robin was dad’s best friend, and you show up for your friends.”