Christopher Reeve, whose career as a screen action hero was cut short by a riding accident, is to direct a film based on the story of a British writer whose life changed for ever when he suffered a serious stroke at the age of 42.
The film version of Robert McCrum's acclaimed book, My Year Off, is to be shot this year in the United States. It will examine the devastating effect that sudden severe disability has on a man at the peak of his powers.
Reeve, who came to fame in the role of Superman in the Eighties, had been enjoying a thriving theatrical and film career when, at the age of 41, a fall from his horse left him paralysed.
He has been in a wheelchair ever since the accident, but has gradually worked his way back into the profession. In 1996 he took a small role as a quadriplegic in the television film Snakes and Ladders and later that year he directed his first film, In the Gloaming.
Reeve will now tell the story of former publisher McCrum, now the literary editor of The Observer. His book has already been adapted for the screen and the story is likely to be relocated to America. Kevin Bacon has been approached to play the lead role.
In 1995, the year of Reeve's accident, McCrum was the high-living editor-in-chief at the London publishing house Faber and Faber. A man who 'burned the candle at both ends', he had been married for two months to the American journalist Sarah Lyall.
One summer evening he went out to dinner at The Ivy, before returning home early with a headache. In the morning he found he was unable to move his left side and was forced to spend a terrifying day alone at home, trying to reach the telephone so that he could answer the frequent phone calls from his wife, who was in San Francisco.
Finally rescued by members of his family, McCrum was rushed to hospital where he learnt he had suffered a stroke.
A year of rehabilitation followed and with it a complete change in his attitudes. Much of McCrum's book focuses on the difficulty of adjusting to the slow pace of life for an invalid.
'Before all this, I could slip across the street to post a letter in the time it takes to type a sentence,' McCrum has written. 'I used to be known for the impressionistic speed with which I could do things, but I have now become friends with slowness, both as a concept and as a way of life.'
