Patricia Neal
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| Patricia Neal | |||||||||||||||||||
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 The Tribeca Film Festival, 2007 |
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| Born | Patsy Louise Neal January 20, 1926 Packard, Whitley County, Kentucky, USA |
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| Spouse(s) | Roald Dahl (1953-1983) | ||||||||||||||||||
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Patricia Neal (born January 20, 1926) is an American award-winning actress of stage and screen.
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[edit] Biography
Neal was born Patsy Louise Neal, in Packard, Whitley County, Kentucky. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and later went on to study drama at Northwestern University. After moving to New York, she accepted her first job as understudy in the Broadway production of The Voice of the Turtle. Soon, though, she appeared in Another Part of the Forest (1946), winning a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play. She also appeared in a 1952 revival of The Children's Hour and The Miracle Worker (1959).
In 1948, 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, whom she had met the year before, 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; Chantal Tessa Sophia; Theo Matthew (b. 1960); Ophelia Magdalena; and Lucy Neal (b. 1965).
By 1952, Neal had starred in The Breaking Point, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Operation Pacific (the last with John Wayne). 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 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). In 1961 and 1962 she suffered the death of one child and a grievous injury to another. Her daughter Olivia died from measles and her son Theo's carriage was hit by a taxi when he was just four months old.
In 1963, Neal won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Hud, co-starring 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. She not only received the Academy Award but also picked up awards from the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review. She also received a BAFTA award from the British Academy. Two years later, she was reunited with John Wayne in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way winning her second BAFTA Award.
Later in 1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms 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.
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 lives in New York City, and owns a house on Martha's Vineyard. She is a frequent speaker at Pro-Life meetings and rallies, discussing her conviction that her own abortion was a mistake which had brought her great emotional pain.
She often appears on the Tony Awards telecast. This may be 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.
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Film
| Year | Film | Role | Other 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; 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 | ||
| 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 |
| 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 | |
| 2008 | Shattered Glory | Mrs. Wyatt | pre-production |
| 2009 | Flying By | Margie | filming |
[edit] Television
- 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] References
- Shearer, Stephen Michael (2006). Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0813123917.
[edit] External links
- Patricia Neal at the Internet Broadway Database
- Patricia Neal at the Internet Movie Database
- Patricia Neal at the TCM Movie Database
- TonyAwards.com Interview with Patricia Neal
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker |
BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role 1963 for Hud |
Succeeded by Anne Bancroft for The Pumpkin Eater |
| Preceded by Sophia Loren for Two Women |
NYFCC Award for Best Actress 1963 for Hud |
Succeeded by Kim Stanley for Séance on a Wet Afternoon |
| Preceded by Anne Bancroft for The Pumpkin Eater |
BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role 1965 for In Harm's Way |
Succeeded by Jeanne Moreau for Viva Maria! |
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| 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 | |
