Patricia Neal

Patricia Neal
at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2007
Born	Patsy Louise Neal
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1949–present
Spouse	Roald Dahl (1953–1983)

Patricia Neal (born January 20, 1926) was an American actress of stage and screen. She won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in the drama Hud (1963).

Early life

Neal was born Patsy Louise Neal, in Packard, Whitley County, Kentucky. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she attended Knoxville High School, and studied drama at Northwestern University.

Career

In The Fountainhead (1949)

After moving to New York, she accepted her first job as understudy in the Broadway production of The Voice of the Turtle. Next she appeared in Another Part of the Forest (1946), winning a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play.

In 1949, Neal made her film debut in John Loves Mary. Her appearance the same year in The Fountainhead coincided with her on-going affair with her married co-star, Gary Cooper. Later she co-starred with Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

By 1952, Neal starred in The Breaking Point, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Operation Pacific. She suffered a nervous breakdown around this time, following the end of her relationship with Cooper and left Hollywood for New York, returning to Broadway in a revival of The Children's Hour, in 1952. She also acted in A Roomful of Roses in 1955 and as the mother in The Miracle Worker in 1959. In films, she starred in A Face in the Crowd (1957) and co-starred in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).

File:Kazan-Face-still.jpg

With Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd (1957)

In 1963, Neal won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Hud, co-starring with Paul Newman. When the film was initially released it was predicted she would be a nominee in the supporting actress category but she began collecting awards and they were always for Best Leading Actress from the New York Film Critics, the National Board of Review and a BAFTA award from the British Academy. Three years later, in 1965, she was reunited with John Wayne in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way winning her second BAFTA Award.

Neal was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), but turned it down, feeling it had come too soon after her 3 1965 strokes. She returned to the big screen in The Subject Was Roses (1968), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.

She later starred as Olivia Walton in the television movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971), which was the pilot episode for The Waltons. Although she won a Golden Globe for her performance, she was not invited to reprise the role in the television series; the part went to Michael Learned. (In a 1999 interview with the Archive of American Television, Waltons creator Earl Hamner said he and producers were unsure if Neal's health would allow her to commit to the grind of a weekly television series.) Neal played a dying widowed mother trying to find a home for her three children in a moving 1975 episode of NBC's Little House on the Prairie.

In 1978, Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville dedicated the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in her honor. The center serves as part of Neal's paralysis victim advocacy. She has appeared in Center advertisements throughout 2006.

In 2007, Neal worked on Silvana Vienne's innovative critically-acclaimed art movie Beyond Baklava: The Fairy Tale Story of Sylvia's Baklava, appearing as herself in the portions of the documentary talking about alternative ways to end violence in the world. Also in 2007, Neal received one of two annually-presented Lifetime Achievement Awards at the SunDeis Film Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts. (Academy Award nominee Roy Scheider was the recipient of the other.)

She often appears on the Tony Awards telecast, perhaps because she is the only surviving winner from the first ceremony. Her original Tony was lost so she was given a replacement by Bill Irwin when they presented the Best Actress Award to Cynthia Nixon in 2006.

In April 2009, Neal received a lifetime achievement award from WorldFest Houston on the occasion of the debut of her film, Flying By. Patricia Neal is a long-term actress with Philip Langner's Theatre at Sea/ Sail With the Stars productions with the Theatre Guild.

Personal life

During the filming of The Fountainhead (1949), Neal had an affair with her married co-star, Gary Cooper, whom she had met in 1947 when she was 21 and he was 46. By 1950, Cooper's wife, Veronica, had found out about the relationship and sent Neal a telegram demanding they end it. Neal became pregnant by Cooper, but he persuaded her to have an abortion.

The affair ended, but not before Cooper's daughter, Maria (now Maria Cooper Janis, born 1937), spat at Neal in public. Years after Cooper's death, Maria and her mother Veronica reconciled with Neal.

Neal met British writer Roald Dahl at a dinner party hosted by Lillian Hellman in 1951. They married on July 2, 1953, at Trinity Church in New York. In 1961 and 1962, the couple suffered through grievous injury to one child and the death of another. Their son Theo's carriage was hit by a taxi when he was just four months old, and their daughter, Olivia, died from measles encephalitis. The marriage produced five children: Olivia Twenty (April 20, 1955 – November 17, 1962); Chantal Tessa Sophia (b. 1957); Theo Matthew (b. 1960); Ophelia Magdalena (b.1964); and Lucy Neal (b. 1965).

While pregnant in 1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms, and was in a coma for three weeks. Dahl directed her rehabilitation and she subsequently relearned to walk and talk ("I think I'm just stubborn, that's all"). On August 4, 1965, she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Lucy.

Neal and Dahl's 30-year marriage ended in divorce in 1983 after Dahl's affair with Neal's friend, Felicity Crosland.

Patricia Neal's autobiography, As I Am, appeared in 1988. In 1981, Glenda Jackson played her in a television movie, The Patricia Neal Story which co-starred Dirk Bogarde as Neal's husband Roald Dahl. Neal lives in New York City, and owns a house on Martha's Vineyard.

Filmography

Film

Year	Film	Role	Notes
1949	John Loves Mary	Mary McKinley
	The Fountainhead	Dominique Francon
	It's a Great Feeling	Herself	cameo
	The Hasty Heart	Sister Parker
1950	Bright Leaf	Margaret Jane Singleton
	The Breaking Point	Leona Charles
	Three Secrets	Phyllis Horn
1951	Operation Pacific	Lt. (j.g.) Mary Stuart
	Raton Pass	Ann Challon
	The Day the Earth Stood Still	Helen Benson
	Week-End with Father	Jean Bowen
1952	Diplomatic Courier	Joan Ross
	Washington Story	Alice Kingsley
	Something for the Birds	Anne Richards
1954	Your Woman	Contessa Germana de Torri
	Stranger from Venus	Susan North
1957	A Face in the Crowd	Marcia Jeffries
1961	Breakfast at Tiffany's	2-E (Mrs. Failenson)
1963	Hud	Alma Brown	Academy Award for Best Actress BAFTA Award National Board of Review Award New York Film Critics Nominated - Golden Globe
1964	Psyche '59	Alison Crawford
1965	In Harm's Way	Lt. Maggie Haynes	BAFTA Award
1968	Pat Neal Is Back	Herself	short subject
	The Subject Was Roses	Nettie Cleary	Nominated - Academy Award for Best Actress
1971	The Night Digger	Maura Prince
1973	Baxter!	Dr. Roberta Clemm
	Happy Mother's Day, Love George	Cara
1974	"Kung-Fu; Blood of the Dragon"	Sarah	TV 2-part episode
1975	B Must Die	Julia
1977	Widow's Nest	Lupe
1979	The Passage	Mrs. Bergson
1979	All Quiet on the Western Front	Paul's Mother
1981	Ghost Story	Stella Hawthorne
1989	An Unremarkable Life	Frances McEllany
1991	Preminger: Anatomy of a Filmmaker	Herself	documentary
1993	"Heidi"	Grandmother
1999	Cookie's Fortune	Jewel Mae 'Cookie' Orcutt
	From Russia to Hollywood: The 100-Year Odyssey of Chekhov and Shdanoff	Herself	documentary
2000	For the Love of May	Grammy May	short subject
2003	Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There	Herself	documentary
	Bright Leaves	Herself	documentary
2007	The Fairy Tale Story of Sylvia's Baklava	Herself	documentary feature film
2008	Shattered Glory	Mrs. Wyatt
2009	Flying By	Margie

Television

• Strindberg on Love (1960)
• Special for Women: Mother and Daughter (1961)
• The Untouchables: The Maggie Storm Story(1962)
• The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971)
• Ghost Story: Time of Terror (1973)
• Things in Their Season (1974)
• Eric (1975)
• Tail Gunner Joe (1977)
• A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story (1978)
• The Bastard (1978) (miniseries)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (1979)
• The Patricia Neal Story (1981) (cameo)
• Love Leads the Way: A True Story (1984)
• Glitter (1984) (pilot for series)
• Shattered Vows (1984)
• Caroline? (1990)
• A Mother's Right: The Elizabeth Morgan Story (1992)
• Heidi (1993)

References

Bibliography

• Encyclopedia of Kentucky. New York, New York: Somerset Publishers. 1987. pp. 182–183. ISBN 0403099811.
• Neal, Patricial (1988). As I Am: An Autobiography New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Shearer, Stephen Michael (2006). Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0813123917.

External links

• Please use a more specific IBDB template. See the documentation for available templates.
• Patricia Neal at the TCM Movie Database
• Patricia Neal at Allmovie
• TonyAwards.com Interview with Patricia Neal