"We spend our lives going through kitchens and riding on freight elevators," Dana Reeve once recalled of the near decade that she and her paralyzed actor husband spent tirelessly lobbying for stem-cell research, a potential treatment for paralysis.

The actress' real-life role as the graceful and devoted caregiver of her husband, who became a paraplegic three years into their marriage, brought her worldwide fame that she found puzzling. She was no "saint," she said, but a woman simply in love.

"Of course I'm doing this," she once said. "What other option is there?"

Dana Reeve, a non-smoker diagnosed with lung cancer within months of the death of her husband in 2004, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Medical Center in New York City, said Kathy Lewis, president of the Christopher Reeve Foundation, which funds research on paralysis.

After Reeve's husband died, she succeeded him as president of the New Jersey-based foundation. To date, it has awarded US$55 million (HK$429 million) in neuroscience research grants and given almost US$8 million to projects that strive to improve the quality of life of those with paralysis.

Formerly known as the American Paralysis Association, it was renamed for the actor in 1999.

Before her death, Reeve made arrangements for the couple's 13-year-old son, Will, to live with a family near the Reeve home in Bedford, New York, so he could maintain existing friendships, according to a report by Fox News.

Will, who lost both parents within 17 months, is reportedly close to the family's son. Reeve is also survived by two grown stepchildren, her father and two sisters.

Her mother died of ovarian cancer in February 2005.

Four months earlier, her husband, best known for starring in four Superman films, died of complications resulting from the spinal-cord injury he suffered in a 1995 horse-riding accident.

When Reeve announced her lung cancer diagnosis in August, it was startling. Yet doctors say one in five women diagnosed with the disease has never smoked a cigarette.

Asked how she kept her spirits up, Reeve said she "had a great role model. I was married to a man who never gave up."

As recently as January 12, Reeve looked healthy as she belted out Carole King's Now and Forever at a packed Madison Square Garden during a retirement ceremony honoring a close friend, New York Rangers hockey star Mark Messier.

Four months ago at a fundraising gala for the foundation, Reeve said she was responding well to treatment.

In a long formal gown, she provoked teasing wolf whistles from actor Robin Williams, who met Christopher Reeve at the Juilliard School and donated hundreds of thousands of US dollars to help pay for his care.

In his 1998 autobiography, Still Me, Christopher Reeve wrote that after the accident he suggested to his wife, then in her early 30s, "Maybe you should let me go." She responded, "I'll be with you for the long haul, no matter what. You're still you, and I love you."

Those were the words, Christopher Reeve said, "that saved my life."

During his nine years in a wheelchair, she was her husband's constant companion.

In 1999, she put together what she called a long-overdue "thank-you letter" to those who had sent words of encouragement after her husband's accident; they received 35,000 pieces of mail in the first three weeks.

The book Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve From Strangers and Friends was also, she said, a love letter to her husband.

Dana met Christopher, who was already a movie star, in 1987 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where she was appearing in a cabaret. As she was singing The Music That Makes Me Dance, he strolled into the room.

Six months later they were living together.

In 1992, they were married and their son was born.

"By the time of Chris' accident, I'd established myself firmly, making a nice income doing commercials and an occasional limited-run play. And I'd realized I didn't want to be doing that with my life," Reeve told Newsday in 1997.

After taking two college courses in child development, she began to investigate doctoral programs and planned to move out of performing when her husband's thoroughbred balked at a jump during a dressage competition.

Thrown from his horse, he was left paralyzed from the neck down and nearly died.

Except for the year she took off after the accident, she continued to act, mainly appearing in episodes of television series and, occasionally, onstage.

She made her Broadway debut in 1998 in the short-lived More to Love: A Big Fat Comedy.

She was performing in the Broadway-bound Brooklyn Boy at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, in 2004 when she rushed home to be at her dying husband's side after he went into cardiac arrest and a coma.

Reeve said she had promised her son she would keep her acting roles to a minimum but after she was widowed, she vowed to return to her career.

Recently, Reeve taped a PBS show, The New Medicine, about how doctors are paying more attention to a patient's cultural values and lifestyle as part of treatment.

Several months before her husband died, the couple gave the 2004 commencement address at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Some of the choices in life "will choose you," she said. "How you face these choices, these turns in the road, with what kind of attitude, more than the choices themselves, is what will define the context of your life." LOS ANGELES TIMES