Christopher Reeve was born on September 25, 1952 in New York City. Reeve traces his love of acting back to the early years of his childhood when he and his younger brother would climb inside cardboard grocery cartons and pretend they were pirate ships. By age eight, he had appeared in school plays, became interested in music, and was taking piano lessons. At age nine, he was chosen to be in an operetta at McCarter Theatre, a professional theater in Princeton, New Jersey. By the age of sixteen, he had an agent. He went to Cornell University where he majored in Music Theory and English. During his college years, he spent time studying theater in Britain and France. And in his final year at Cornell, he was one of two students (the other being Robin Williams) accepted to New York's famous Juilliard School of Performing Arts. Reeve has been in a total of 17 feature films, a dozen TV movies, and about 150 plays. Since his years after his accident in 1995, Reeve has gradually regained sensation in parts of his body—notably down the spine, in his left leg, and areas of his left arm. He continues to schedule many speaking engagements and is considering several projects to direct in the spring while tirelessly raising money for spinal cord injury research. He looks to the future with characteristic enthusiasm, saying: "I'm realistically optimistic. I don't plan to spend the rest of my life like this."