"I think I learned a long time ago that life just isn't fair, so I stopped expecting it to be, " Dana Reeve told reporters late last summer when she announced that, while she wasn't a smoker, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

"But we're going to get through this like we've gotten through everything else."

It was one battle the woman who had won worldwide admiration as a symbol of strength and courage in the face of adversity would not win.

On her wedding day, at the age of 31, Dana Morosini seemed to have it all. A singing and acting career on the up, a handsome Hollywood star as a husband, a baby boy about to be born.

The beautiful blonde, who had come from a settled middle-class background, had always appeared to sail through life.

She had had a happy privileged childhood growing up in an affluent neighbourhood in New York City, where her father was a cardiologist and her mother a stay-athome mum.

As a child and teenager, Dana excelled academically. She graduated top of her class from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1984 and left to study drama in California and London.

It was shortly after graduate school in 1987, just when she was starting to win various small acting and singing roles on TV and in theatre, that she met actor Christopher Reeve.

At the time, Reeve was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Having made four hugely successful Supermanmovies, he was trying, as he said, to "shake the cape" through smaller budget films and theatre.

Dana was singing at a Massachusetts club during a theatre festival when they first ran into each other.

He would later say it was an "intense attraction which quickly developed into love".

Friends . . . including Robin Williams, who'd been a roommate of Reeve's at the prestigious Julliard drama school in New York . . .said the pair were smitten from the word go.

They were together for five years before marrying in June 1992.

Like her future husband, Dana had started her career on daytime soap operas, having won a small role on All My Children. But her career was briefly put on hold when she fell pregnant in late 1991 with what was to be the couple's only child, Will, who was born the following April.

Dana also became a stepmother to Reeve's two older children, Alexandra and Matthew, from a previous relationship with model Gae Exton.

The first three years of the Reeves' marriage was by all accounts idyllic.

They had a healthy son, plenty of money, and Dana's career, which had been temporarily on hold while raising Will, was starting to take off again thanks to roles on and off Broadway.

Dana would later recall: "We were together five years before we married so we were ready, ready for whatever."

The 'whatever' that came would be more dramatic than either of them could have imagined.

Just three years into their marriage, on 27 May 1995, the Reeves' world as they knew it collapsed.

Christopher Reeve, an accomplished equestrian and so long the icon of strength and physical grace through his Superman role, was thrown from his mount at an event in Culpeper, Virginia. His horse had stalled at a jump and Reeve landed hard on his head. He had suffered a severe spinal-cord injury, and he lay in a coma for four days.

Dana later told reporters: "Really, the only thing I ever said when he was in the ICU was, let's wait until he wakes up and let him decide what to do."

Reeve did decide. He decided to live thanks to his wife's unfailing love and encouragement. During later interviews he revealed that they discussed suicide one day early on.

"I thought about it for a day. I couldn't do anything about it but we talked about it. I said, 'I'm probably not worth having. You probably should let me go.' She said, 'It's your choice but you're still you and I love you.'" Reeve said without her love and the life she offered him . . . or had he been single when the accident happened . . . he would never have lived.

"Her love made all the difference in the world. Every time she came in the door the aides would always say: 'Here comes your medication man.'" Dana Reeve's light was not restricted to her husband. Together they became political activists for all victims of paralysis, campaigning for the use of unwanted embryos for stem-cell research. They started the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, which to date has funded more than $63m in research on paralysis and quality-of-life grants to the disabled.

They also opened the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Centre in New Jersey which helps paralysed people live more independently. Ironically, just two weeks ago the federal government decided to cut its $6m funding to the centre.

In October 2004, nine and a half years after the accident, Dana Reeve was again trying to revive the career she'd put on hold for a decade, performing on stage in California in a Broadway-bound play, Brooklyn Boy, when she got a call that her husband had suffered a cardiac arrest brought on by an infection. By the time she made it back to New York he was already in a coma. He died as she sat at his bedside.

"I feel so grateful for those nine and a half years, " she later said.

"We were living a life that was always on the edge. We were not afraid to have big talks and to have emotional talks. We were very much aware of the gifts we had. Chris gave us all a precious gift by living the life he did and despite the inherent difficultiesf or perhaps because of the very nature of this life, our family has remained happy, intact, focused and deeply connected."

Though publicly Dana was the picture of grace and stoicism, privately friends say she grieved tremendously for the man she called 'Buddy.'

One of the memories closest to her heart she said was remembering the times they had shared as parents.

"We had to share so much with other people, " she told an interviewer last year. "But this we shared exclusively between the two of usf I do great and then I really miss him."

After his death, she put her own life on hold again to run his foundation and continue his cause.

"Chris was very comfortable in the public eye and thrived in that kind of environment. I less so. I tend to not want to do the stuff, and I do it more out of duty. Chris was a buffer for me in that regard. I could say, 'I'm not doing that interview.' He was very happy to do it, " she told Oprah Winfrey last year.

Though she said her instinct was to mourn in private for a very long time, a week and a half after her husband's death Dana Reeve was out campaigning for US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in Ohio wearing her husband's wedding ring around her neck and carrying his cause to the podium.

"She said, 'Chris is the beacon guiding me, '" Kerry recalled in tributes to her this week.

If anything, her light seemed to shine brighter than ever, which is why the announcement a few months later that she had lung cancer seemed even more tragic.

As usual, Reeve greeted it with dignity and optimism.

"I hope before too long to be sharing news of my good health and recovery, " she said in a statement. "More than ever I feel Chris with me as I face this challenge. As always I look to him as the ultimate example of defying the odds with strength, courage and hope in the face of life's adversities."

The revelation last August was particularly poignant, given that Reeve had lost her mother to complications from ovarian cancer a few months before.

In her typically restrained fashion she said she only made the announcement because the tabloid magazine the National Enquirer had threatened to break the story.

In a rare interview during her treatment two months ago, she told reporters: "Life keeps me going. I'm basically a happy person. I don't need much of a push to keep going."

Her last public appearance came in January when she sang at Madison Square Garden in New York for the retirement of her husband's friend, New York Rangers hockey player Mark Messiers, wearing what she called her 'Barbarella' wig to hide her hair loss from chemotherapy.

The song was Carole King's 'Now and Forever' where she channeled again the love she had shared with her late husband.

At his memorial service in 2004, she broke down while telling guests: "I made a vow when I married Chris that I would love him in sickness and in health and I did okay with that. But I made another promise to love, honour and cherish him till death did us part. I can't do that because I will love honour and cherish him forever."

Dana Reeve died at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Centre in New York last Monday night just days shy of her 45th birthday.

She may have dreamt of being a Broadway star as a little girl. Instead she shone as a powerful political activist and a worldwide symbol of enduring love and optimism in the most difficult of circumstances.

THE CURSE OF SUPERMAN

>> The first appearance of Superman in screen form came to television in 1941, when Bud Collyer voiced the animated version of the superhero. Collyer would be the forerunner for the 'curse' rumours that have circulated around the man in blue to this day. In 1966 he returned to voice the cartoon 'The New Adventures of Superman' for TV. Shortly afterwards he died of a heart problem.

>> From 1953 to 1957, George Reeves portrayed the first live-action Superman on screen. When the programme was cancelled after four years, Reeves fell into a depression at not being able to shift his career away from the 'man of steel' tag. He eventually committed suicide at his home in Beverly Hills of a single gunshot wound to the head. Some have claimed it was murder, as Reeves' prints were not found on the gun. He'd allegedly been having an affair with the wife of the then MGM head. Subsequent owners of the home have claimed to have seen Reeves' ghost resplendent in his blue Superman costume in the main bedroom.

>> Margot Kidder was Christopher Reeve's Lois Lane in the late '70s and early '80s films. Yet she failed to ignite her career despite the high profile. In 1996 she suffered a very public mental breakdown and was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. She has since retired to a quiet life in Livingston, Montana.

>> The current production of the new man of steel film, 'Superman Returns', has been plagued with production problems.

It's said to be way over budget, at over $200 million. With two relatively B-list actors in the leads . . . Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth . . . it has a lot of ground to make up at the box office. Rumours have also circulated that several actors declined playing the lead role, not wanting to be associated with the 'curse'.