Patricia Neal
Patricia Neal (born Patsy Louise Neal; January 20, 1926 – August 8, 2010) was an American actress of stage and screen. She is well known for, among other roles, playing World War II widow Helen Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), radio journalist Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd (1957), wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and the worn-out housekeeper Alma Brown in Hud (1963) (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress). She also featured as the matriarch in the television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971); her role as Olivia Walton was re-cast for the series it inspired, The Waltons. A major star of the 1950s and 1960s, she was the recipient of an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, and two British Academy Film Awards, and was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards.
This article is about the actress. For the actress, comedian, and writer of the same birth name, see Fannie Flagg.
Patricia Neal
August 8, 2010 (aged 84)
Actress
1945–2010
- Sophie Dahl (granddaughter)
- Phoebe Dahl (granddaughter)
Early life and education[edit]
Neal was born in Packard, Whitley County, Kentucky, to William Burdette Neal and Eura Mildred (née Petrey) Neal. She had two siblings.[1][2]
Neal grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she attended Knoxville High School,[3] and studied drama at Northwestern, where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority. At Northwestern, she was crowned Syllabus Queen in a campus-wide beauty pageant.[4]
During the filming of The Fountainhead (1949), Neal began an affair with her married co-star Gary Cooper, whom she had met in 1947 when she was 21 and he was 46.[10] At one point in their relationship, Cooper hit her in the face after he caught Kirk Douglas trying to seduce her.[11] During this time, she was a Democrat who supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 presidential election.[12]
Neal met British writer Roald Dahl at a dinner party hosted by Lillian Hellman in 1952, while Dahl was living in New York.[13] They married on July 2, 1953, at Trinity Church in New York. The marriage produced five children:[1]
On December 5, 1960, their son Theo, four months old, suffered brain damage when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. In May 1961, the family returned to Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Theo continued his rehabilitation.[15] Neal described the two years of family life during Theo's recovery as one of the most beautiful periods of her life.[15] However, on November 17, 1962, their daughter Olivia died at age 7 from measles encephalitis.[16] The story of Olivia's death and how Neal and Dahl coped with the tragedy was dramatized in 2020 as a made-for-TV movie, To Olivia.[17]
Neal was a heavy smoker.[18] She suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant in 1965 and was in a coma for three weeks. Variety magazine ran an obituary, but she survived with the assistance of Dahl and a number of volunteers who developed a gruelling style of therapy which fundamentally changed the way that stroke patients were treated.[19] This period of their lives was dramatised in the television film The Patricia Neal Story (1981), in which the couple was played by Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde.[20]
On August 4, 1965, Neal gave birth to a healthy daughter. She subsequently relearned to walk and talk,[15] and after her recovery, was nominated for an Oscar for her 1968 performance in The Subject Was Roses.
In 1983, following Dahl's 11-year affair with Felicity D'Abreu,[21] a set designer he met when she worked with Neal on a Maxim Coffee advertisement, Neal's marriage ended in divorce.[22] She returned to live in the US. In her autobiography, As I Am (1988), Neal wrote: "A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug."[23]
Legacy[edit]
In 1978, Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville dedicated the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in her honor. The center provides intense treatment for stroke, spinal cord, and brain injury patients. It serves as part of Neal's advocacy for paralysis victims. She regularly visited the center in Knoxville, providing encouragement to its patients and staff. Neal appeared as the center's spokeswoman in advertisements until her death.[24]
Death[edit]
Neal died at her home in Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, on August 8, 2010, from lung cancer. She was 84 years old.[25]
She had become a Catholic four months before she died[26] and was buried in the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where the actress Dolores Hart, her friend since the early 1960s, had become a nun and ultimately prioress. Neal had been a longtime supporter of the abbey's open-air theatre and arts program.[27]