Here's Lookin' at You, Kidder

Early in your career you appeared in the TV series
Banacek,

and there's a moment where you make fun of the fact that George
Peppard's detective character goes by one name, "like
Superman," which now plays like some kind of cosmic hint at
your future. Do you think you were fated to play Lois Lane?

No, I don't believe in that shit. I think I went and worked
hard and auditioned and got the part because I did a good
audition.

How'd it feel taking on a character that had already been in
the cultural zeitgeist for over 40 years [in the
Superman

comics, TV series, and early movies]?

I wasn't really aware of that at all. I wasn't allowed to read
comics as a kid, and we didn't have TV. So I was way up in the
Canadian north, and although I'd heard of Superman, I didn't
really know anything about him or Lois Lane -- not till I got
the part. Even then my knowledge was sketchy and I based my
character on the script and what the writers wrote.

One of my favorite moments in the series is when you punched
out that bitch Ursa in
Superman II.

Was that punch as good for you as it was for audiences?

Oh, you liked that? At one point I actually hit her, which was
a great to-do on the set. It was by accident, of course. She's
fun, Sarah [actress Sarah Douglas]. She's a good girl.

At the end of
Superman II,

Superman gives Lois a kiss that eliminates her memory of their
romantic relationship. Do you think we'd all be better off if
our relationships ended with an amnesia kiss?

Oh, no! You don't want to forget. I mean, you get to my age and
you look back at this tapestry your life has made, which
everyone has (unless they've locked themselves in a closet and
never gone out), and all those romances, failed or not -- well,
they're all failed, I suppose, because they all end -- are part
of it. You don't want to forget any of that. Although they do
have a pill coming out that erases people's bad memories. God
save us all, they want to use it for post-traumatic stress
victims. What will the pharmaceutical industry think of
next?

In
Superman III,

Lois Lane appears only briefly before disappearing on a
vacation to Bermuda-

[
Interrupting

] That's because I called the producers contemptuous human
beings in the press!

Well, the movie lost me at that point, because as a young
kid I was more interested in following Lois on her Bermudian
adventures. Think she had fun?

She did. She had a good time [
laughs

].

In 1979 you starred in the horror classic
The Amityville Horror,

based on the real-life account of the Lutz family, who fled
their supposedly haunted Long Island home after 28 days. It was
later discovered that they returned on the 29th day to host a
garage sale. What do you think -- Amityville horror or
Amityville hoax?

I don't believe in any of that stuff; I just thought it was a
good horror movie. It was a movie [
laughs

]. I don't think people have to think it's real to enjoy
it.