Although perhaps not the best-known name from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, Oscar winner Patricia Neal, who had a string of great roles in classic films, has passed away, aged 84.
A Tennessee native, Neal first went to Broadway, getting noticed quite quickly and winning a Tony at the very first ceremony where they were handed out, for her 1946 appearance in Another Part Of The Forest. Neal was soon spotted by Hollywood, becoming a star after only her second screen role, opposite Gary Cooper in 1949’s The Fountainhead. As couple of years later, in 1951, she achieved sci-fi immortality playing the female lead in the wonderful The Day the Earth Stood Still, as Helen Benson, the woman who befriends (via her son Bobby) alien visitor Klaatu.
In 1953 she married children’s author Roald Dahl, and stayed with him until 1983 (after she discovered he was having an affair).
Although her career struggled in the mid-to-late 50s, with her largely scoring TV roles, she had a small but good part in 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and then landed what is perhaps her best role, as Alma Brown in 1963’s Hud. Playing the middle-aged housekeeper who becomes an object of affection for both Paul Newman’s Hud and his nephew Lonnie, only for things to end badly, won Neal the Best Actress Oscar.
However what should have been her moment to truly shine, was cruelly curtailed by three strokes she suffered while pregnant in 1965, at the age of only 39 (the baby, incidentally, was born healthy). It was a hideously bad time for Neal, as only a couple of years before her strokes, one of her children had been run over by a taxi, while another died of measles.
After having to fight back from the illness (she needed to relearn how to walk and talk) and turn down major roles like Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate because of it, Neal’s career never really recovered, partially because producers were afraid of her health problems. For example she played the mother role of Olivia in the pilot TV movie for The Waltons, and won a Golden Globe for it, but was replaced by Michael Learned in the actual show, because the makers weren’t sure Neal could withstand the grind of a weekly TV show. Neal’s struggles during this period were chronicled in the 1981 TV movie, The Patricia Neal story, with Glenda Jackson in the lead role.
While still appearing on stage and screen, but never in sort of major roles she’d earlier seemed destined to score, Neal also dedicated herself to promoting stroke awareness (a stroke and brain injury rehabilitation centre is named for her in Knoxville, Tennessee), and wrote an autobiography that appeared in 1988. While she largely retired after 2000, her final role was a small one in the 2009 indie flick, Flying By.
Neal died of lung cancer at her home in Martha’s Vineyard.
Patricial Neal – January 20th, 1926-August 8th, 2010 – RIP