The Stage

Patricia Neal

Published Friday 27 August 2010 at 16:35 by Richard Anthony Baker

The life story of the Oscar-winning American actress, Patricia Neal, was as dramatic as any film she made. In fact, she and her husband for 30 years, the writer, Roald Dahl, were the subject of a biopic, The Patricia Neal Story, in which they were played by Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde. After collecting an Academy Award for her role as a housekeeper in the Paul Newman movie, Hud (1962), she suffered three strokes that nearly killed her. Dahl nursed her back to full health and then left her.

Patricia Neal studied drama at university in Illinois and then went to New York to appear in a Eugene O’Neill play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. Within days of meeting O’Neill, she was offered two further roles on Broadway and chose to play the lead in Another Part of the Forest by Lillian Hellman. After that, she began her Hollywood career, appearing first opposite Ronald Reagan in John Loves Mary (1949). The critics savaged her, but, thanks to a long contract with Warner Brothers, she was given the female lead opposite Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead [also 1949]. The film flopped, but she had a year-long affair with Cooper, who was 25 years her senior and who she later described as the love of her life.

A third film, Bright Leaf (1950), was another flop and she returned to New York, where she met Dahl at a party. At first, she said, she loathed him for his rudeness. But in 1953 she married him. On Broadway again, she started getting good reviews, most notably for her portrayal of Helen Keller’s mother in The Miracle Worker (1959). In the following year, however, shortly after she had finished filming for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, her baby son, Theo, suffered brain damage when his pram was hit by a taxi. Two years later, her seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, contracted encephalitis, a complication of measles, and died.

Undaunted, Neal carried on working, landing herself with the role in Hud and then a star part with John Wayne in Seven Women (1965). That year, though, she suffered the series of strokes that left her blind, dumb and partially paralysed. Dahl devised a strict programme of recovery for her [she later described him as Roald, the slave driver] and after 18 months, she was able to make a speech at a charity gala, for which she was given a standing ovation. A year later, she returned to work, appearing in the movie, The Subject Was Roses (1968), for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She also won three Emmy nominations.

In 1983, she discovered that Dahl had been having a long-running affair with her best friend and the couple parted. From then on, Neal undertook less acting work and became more involved in raising funds for stroke victims.

Patricia Neal, who was born on January 20 1926, died on August 8, aged 84.