Patricia Neal

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Patricia Neal is also the birth name of novelist, actress, and screenwriter Fannie Flagg.


Patricia Neal

Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954
Birth name Patsy Louise Neal
Born January 20, 1926 (age 81)
Flag of United States Packard, Kentucky, US
Spouse(s) Roald Dahl (1953-1983)
Academy Awards
Best Actress
1963 Hud
Tony Awards
Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play
1947 Another Part of the Forest

Patricia Neal (born January 20, 1926, Packard, Kentucky) is an Academy Award winning American actress.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born Patsy Louise Neal, Patricia Neal grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied drama at Northwestern University, before moving to New York, where she got her first job (an understudy in the Broadway production of The Voice of the Turtle) only after looking for over two months. Soon, though, she appeared in Another Part of the Forest (1946), winning winning a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play. In 1949, she 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 older co-star, Gary Cooper, whom she had met two years earlier, when he was 46 and she was 21. 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[1] which made her feel guilty for many years. The affair ended—but not before Cooper's daughter, Maria (now Maria Cooper Janis, born 1937), spat at her in public. Years after Cooper's death, Maria and her mother Veronica reconciled with Patricia 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. The marriage produced five children: Olivia Twenty (April 20, 1955 - November 17, 1962), who died of measles encephalitis, Tessa Sophia, Theo Matthew, who was hit by a taxi cab when he was four months old, Ophelia Magdalena, and Lucy Neal (b. 1965).

Neal starred in The Breaking Point, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Operation Pacific by 1952. She suffered a nervous breakdown around that time, following the end of her relationship with Cooper, and left Hollywood for New York, where she returned to Broadway in a revival of The Children's Hour, in 1952. (She also did A Roomful of Roses in 1955, and 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). In 1961 and 1962 she suffered the death of two children, her son in a traffic accident, and her daughter from measles.

In 1963, Neal won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Hud, co-starring Paul Newman. Two years later, she was reunited with John Wayne in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way.

Later in 1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurisms while pregnant, 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 was offered the role of "Mrs. Robinson" in The Graduate (1967), but turned it down, feeling it had come too soon after her 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. 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 1981 Glenda Jackson played her in a television movie, The Patricia Neal Story which co-starred Dirk Bogarde as Roald Dahl. Neal and Dahl's stormy 30-year marriage finally ended in divorce in November 1983 after Dahl's affair with Neal's then-best friend, Felicity Crosland. In 1988 Neal published an autobiography, As I Am.

She lives in New York City, and owns a house on Martha's Vineyard as well.

[edit] Filmography

Awards
Preceded by
Anne Bancroft
for The Miracle Worker		 Academy Award for Best Actress
1963
for Hud		 Succeeded by
Julie Andrews
for Mary Poppins

[edit] Television work

  • Strindberg on Love (1960)
  • Special for Women: Mother and Daughter (1961)
  • The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971)
  • 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)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life

[edit] References

  • Shearer, Stephen Michael (2006). Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2391-7. 

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Neal, Patricia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Neal, Patsy Louise
SHORT DESCRIPTION actress
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Packard, Kentucky, US
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
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