Patricia Neal

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Patsy Louise Neal, born January 20, 1926 – August 8, 2010), an American actress of stage and film.

Helen Benson, the widow of World War II (1951), wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and naes widow Alma Brown in Hud (1963), for which she received the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Olivia Walton appeared in the television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971), and her character as the matriarch was re-cast in the series It inspired, The Waltons.

Early life and education

Neal was born in Packard, Kentucky, to William Burdette Neal and Eura Mildred (née Pettin) Neal. She had two siblings.

Neal grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she attended Knoxville High School and studied drama at Northwestern University, where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority. In a campus-wide beauty pageant, she was named Syllabus Queen.

Personal life

Neal began an affair with her married co-star Gary Cooper, whom she had seen in 1947 when she was 21 and 46 years old, during the filming of The Fountainhead (1949). Cooper struck her in the chest at one point in their friendship after he noticed Kirk Douglas attempting to seduce her. She ran as a Democrat who endorsed Adlai Stevenson's campaign during the 1952 presidential race.

While Dahl was living in New York, Neal met British writer Roald Dahl at a dinner party hosted by Lillian Hellman in 1952. They married in New York on July 2, 1953, at Trinity Church. There were five children in the family's household.

Their son Theo, a four-month-old boy, was killed by a taxicab in New York City on December 5, 1960. The family returned to Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Theo began his recovery in May 1961. Neal characterized Theo's recovery's two years as one of the most beautiful periods of her life. Olivia's mother Olivia died of measles encephalitis at age 7 on November 17, 1962. In 2020, the story of Olivia's death and how Neal and Dahl coped with the tragedy was dramatized as a made-for-TV film To Olivia.

Neal was a big smoker. When she was pregnant in 1965, she had three burst cerebral aneurysms and was in a coma for three weeks. Dahl died in a book about a stroke victim, but she maintained her with the help of a handful of volunteers who created a grueling style of therapy that fundamentally changed the way stroke patients were handled. The couple's lives were chronicled in the television film The Patricia Neal Story (1981), in which Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde played them. She regained the ability to walk and talk and gave birth to a healthy daughter on August 4, 1965. She was nominated for an Oscar for her 1968 appearance in The Subject Was Roses, following her recovery.

Neal's marriage ended in divorce in 1983 and she returned to the United States to live. "A positive mental attitude will produce more miracles than any wonder drug," Neal wrote in her autobiography, As I Am (1988).

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Career

In the Broadway revival of John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle, Neal found her first position in New York as an understudy. In the first presentation of the Tony Awards, she appeared in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest (1946), receiving the 1947 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Neal appeared in John Loves Mary, Ronald Reagan's second role in The Hasty Heart, and then The Fountainhead (all 1949). The shooting of the last film coincided with her affair with her married co-star Gary Cooper, with whom she appeared in Bright Leaf (1950).

In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) with Michael Rennie, Neal appeared in Operation Pacific (also 1951) starring John Wayne. Around this time, she suffered with a nervous breakdown after she came to an end with Cooper and left Hollywood for New York, returning to Broadway in 1952 for a revival of The Children's Hour. Edith Sommer's A Roomful of Roses, staged by Guthrie McClintic, appeared in 1955.

Neal began attending the Actors Studio in New York. She co-starred in the film A Face in the Crowd (1957, directed by Elia Kazan), the film Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman, based on acquaintances. Nehemiah Persoff, one of the first generation of Actors Studio members, appeared on television in an episode of The Play of the Week (1960), starring an Actors Studio-dominated cast and a British version of Clifford Odets' Clash by Night (1959), which co-starred one of the first generation of Actors Studio members.

Neal was named Best Actress in Hud (1963), co-starring Paul Newman. When the film first premiered, it was anticipated that she would be a nominee in the supporting actress category, but the National Board of Review, the National Board of Review, and a BAFTA award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts announced her that she would be nominated for Best Actress.

In In Harm's Way (1965), Neal was reunited with John Wayne, receiving her second BAFTA Award. Her next film, The Subject Was Roses (1968), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, was the subject was Roses (1968). She starred as the matriarch in the television film The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971), which inspired the television series The Waltons' The Waltons; she was named after a Golden Globe for her role. Waltons creator Earl Hamner said in a 1999 interview with the Archive of American Television, she and producers were uncertain if Neal's health would allow her to commit to a weekly television series; so, instead, they cast Michael Learned in the role of Olivia Walton. In an episode of NBC's Little House on the Prairie broadcast in 1975, Neal played a dying widowed mother struggling to find a home for her three children.

In the 1970s, Neal appeared in a string of television commercials, including those for pain relief drugs Anacin and Maxim instant coffee.

In Robert Altman's film Cookie's Fortune (1999), Neal played the title role. Silvana Vienne's film Beyond Baklava: The Fairy Tale Tales of Sylvia's Baklava (2004), she appeared as herself in the segments of the documentary discussing alternative ways to resolve violence in the world. Neal received one of two Lifetime Achievement Awards at the SunDeis Film Festival in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the same year as the film's debut. (Academy Award nominee Roy Scheider was the recipient of the award.)

Neal performed as a host in later years after winning a Tony Award in their inaugural year (1947) and then becoming the last living winner from the first ceremony. When she was supposed to present the 2006 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play to Cynthia Nixon, her original Tony was lost, so she was given a surprise replacement by Bill Irwin. Neal was given a lifetime achievement award by WorldFest Houston in April 2009 on the occasion of her debut of her film Flying By. Neal was a long-serving actress with Philip Langner's Theatre at Sea/Sail With the Stars productions with the Theatre Guild. She appeared in a number of health-care documentaries in her remaining years.

In 2003, Neal was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She was a participant of This Is Your Life in 1978, when Eamonn Andrews surprised her at a cocktail party on London's Park Lane.

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