Patricia Neal RIP

Patricia Neal

Patricia Neal, who died on Sunday aged 84, was a husky-voiced, Oscar-winning actress with a high-cheekboned, classical appeal; her career on film was interrupted by a series of personal tragedies, notably three near-fatal cerebral aneurysms from which she was nursed back to health by her husband, Roald Dahl.

So bleak was the prognosis in 1965 after Patricia Neal suffered the multiple strokes, which struck as she bathed her eldest daughter, that Variety mistakenly published news of her death. She was only 39 at the time, and pregnant with her fifth child by Dahl.

But against all expectations Patricia Neal not only survived, but also largely recovered the control over her body of which she had been stripped by the attacks. Having won an Oscar for her role opposite Paul Newman in Hud (1963), her rehabilitation was complete enough for her to perform again in The Subject Was Roses (1968) opposite Martin Sheen. Her unborn child also survived.
It was a combination of triumph and tragedy that came to define Patricia Neal’s life.

She credited her recovery, for example, almost exclusively to the dedication and cussed determination of her husband. It was Dahl who refused to let her cave in to being, as she later put it, “an enormous pink cabbage”. Relentlessly, mockingly, he drove Patricia Neal to rediscover her mental agility, while simultaneously surrounding her with physical therapists.

Eventually he insisted that she was well enough to take to the public platform again. It was 1967. “I knew at that moment that Roald the slave driver, Roald the bastard, with his relentless scourge, Roald the Rotten, as I had called him more than once, had thrown me back into the deep water where I belonged,” she later wrote.

But having nursed Patricia Neal back to health, Dahl went on to leave her for a close friend, Felicity Crosland, who became his second wife. “I am bitter, yes,” she said the year after their divorce. “He did so much for me after my strokes. It was a terrible blow when I found out.”

She was born Patsy Lou Neal at Packard, Kentucky, on January 20 1926, to a family with a penchant for whimsical names. Her father Coot acquired his nickname because he was “just plain cute”; her sister Margaret Ann was known as NiNi Neal; and her mother Eura was named after Eura Hogg, one of three daughters of a well-known Texan family.

Patsy Lou was educated at Knoxville High School, quickly developing a taste for drama. She won a state award for “dramatic reading” and studied Drama at Northwestern University, Illinois, which she left in 1943 to take up an opportunity in New York to play a part in Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. There she was encouraged to drop her first names in favour of Patricia, which seemed better to fit her stately beauty.

She then had several small roles, making ends meet with odd jobs and modelling work, until she met O’Neill in person, after he attended one of her productions. “I think his interest was personal,” she recalled. But Patricia Neal was clear-eyed about the ways of the world and the best ways to advance her career. “Flirting was a tool of the trade,” she said, “and I was an expert.”

She was far from being the exploited ingénue: “It’s terrible what I did in those days. I don’t know what happened to my morals: if I wanted someone, I wanted them.” Within days of meeting O’Neill she was offered two Broadway roles, plumping for the lead in the playwright Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest. Her performance won a host of accolades including a Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics Award. Aged 21 she made the cover of Life magazine, and was quickly whisked away to Hollywood.

Her career in film started with John Loves Mary (1949) opposite Ronald Reagan. (“He was a pleasant fellow. We had adjoining suites and dined together each evening, but he never made a pass at me, dash it all”). The film was equally unsuccessful and, perhaps inevitably given that she had no training for the screen, her performance was panned.

It didn’t seem to matter. Signed to a long contract with Warner Bros., she was quickly assigned the female lead opposite Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead (1949). The film, once again, was not a success. But this time Patricia Neal struck up a blazing romance with her fellow star, who at 48 was a quarter of a century her senior. None the less she always described the actor as the only true love of her life. “He is one of the most beautiful things that ever happened to me in my life. I love him even now,” she confessed 40 years later.

But Cooper was married and the affair, which they attempted to keep secret, scandalised Los Angeles. “It was pure hell. People actually turned their heads away when I walked in a room.” Patricia Neal also pointed out that many of the women who ostracised her were themselves ex-mistresses who had supplanted the previous wives of their husbands.

She described “quiet evenings with Gary”. “He would whip up a scrumptious guacamole dip. After supper we just sat and listened to records”. But that was clearly not all they did, and she became pregnant with his baby in 1950. She regretted the abortion for the rest of her life. “If I had only one thing to do over in my life,” she wrote in her autobiography As I Am (1988, written with Richard DeNeut), “I would have that baby.”

The affair ended a year later, by which time she had made a third film flop, Bright Leaf. Cooper went on to make High Noon with Grace Kelly, while Patricia Neal starred with Michael Rennie in the science-fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. Her character was required to befriend a messenger from outer space and she was frequently reduced to giggles by the script, particularly when required to address the alien in his own “language”. She managed, just, to keep a straight face as she exclaimed: “Gort! Klaatu Barada Nikto”.

The film, and several other lightweight features she was required to perform in, failed to ignite her career, and by her mid-twenties it seemed her days as a Hollywood star were already over. Reeling from her break with Cooper, she returned to New York.

There, at a party given by Lillian Hellman, Patricia Neal met a brusque writer of short stories who had been posted to America with the RAF after being shot down during the war. It was not love at first sight. In fact, she went as far as to admit that she initially “loathed” Roald Dahl. “I was infuriated by his rudeness.”

But Patricia Neal was later persuaded to overcome her initial reaction and the pair were married in 1953, beginning a turbulent 30-year union. “I knew I had had the love of my life,” she said, referring to Cooper. “I don’t think he [Dahl] really cared either. But we both wanted children.”

She continued to appear in plays, among them Broadway productions of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. In 1957 she returned to film, in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, playing a radio reporter opposite Andy Griffith. It was a demanding role that finally gave her a chance to shine, and the reviews were rapturous. More good notices followed for theatre work, notably for her portrayal of Helen Keller’s mother in the stage version of The Miracle Worker (1959).

But just as her career seemed on the up again, personal tragedy intervened. Lying in his pram, her four-month-old son, Theo, was crushed by a taxicab in December 1960, leaving him brain-damaged. In total he underwent eight operations on his skull. Roald Dahl decided to remove the family from the city, taking refuge in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. It was there that, two years later, the couple’s eldest daughter, Olivia, contracted measles and died within the day. She was seven.

Despite the death, Patricia Neal returned to work. She landed a role opposite Paul Newman in the film Hud, playing a housekeeper who fights to resist the young star’s obvious charms. Patricia Neal suggested it wasn’t all acting. “Oh, wasn’t he gorgeous? I was attracted to him, but I knew I’d better leave that alone.” The following year she collected an Academy Award for the performance.

Oscar in hand, she was on the up again. She starred with John Wayne in In Harm’s Way, released in 1965. But then in February that year, after finishing the first day’s shooting for John Ford’s Seven Women, she fell victim to three powerful strokes. “Frequently my life has been likened to a Greek tragedy,” she wrote later. “The actress in me cannot deny that comparison.”

Aged 39, she was plunged into a coma. That she survived at all was largely down to Dahl who, familiar with brain trauma after Theo’s accident, had immediately called a neurosurgeon. After two weeks her condition stabilised. After three weeks she emerged from unconsciousness – partially paralysed and blind and completely dumb – to the then dubious welcome of Dahl’s rigorous recovery regime.

It paid painful dividends. Within three months she could just walk, and her speech was somewhat recovered. “I loathed life,” she said. “I had exercises to do every day. My husband had people coming in to teach me — three a day. I wanted to commit suicide, but I didn’t know how.” After six months she gave birth to a healthy daughter, Lucy.

After 18 months Patricia Neal recovered her lust for life: “I wanted to live again.” At Dahl’s insistence, she made an appearance at a fund-raising event for the Brain Injured Children association in New York. Her painstakingly memorised speech, delivered with the deliberate, concentrated manner that subsequently became a feature of her acting, was greeted with a standing ovation.

Within another year – again at Dahl’s insistence – she returned to work, filming The Subject Was Roses. It was a triumph and she was again nominated for an Academy Award, though this time she did not win.

She won the first of her three Emmy nominations playing Olivia Walton in The Homecoming (1971), the film that preceded the long-running series, The Waltons. But she acted less. Indeed, in 1982, she herself was being played by an actress, Glenda Jackson, in the film portrayal of her dramatic life with Dahl (he was played by Dirk Bogarde). In an interview, their daughter Tessa Dahl said: “My parents are both very unhappy about the film. There’s an oversensitive Englishman playing my father and a Northern shopgirl as my mother. My parents aren’t getting a penny out of it”.

In 1983 Patricia Neal and Dahl separated after she found out about his long-running affair. Her bitterness (“Roald is growing old,” she said, “but at least I’ve had his best years. Now he’s got a nurse for his old age.”) was tempered by consolation from the least expected of counsellors – Gary Cooper’s widow, Rocky, whom Patricia had cuckolded three decades previously.

At Rocky’s urging Patricia Neal went into retreat at Regina Laudis Abbey in New England. “I was wild about the food,” Patricia Neal said, “especially the fresh bread and lentil soup. I traded in my street clothes for a black dress, scrubbed off my make-up and covered my hair with a black headscarf”.

Increasingly she became active in campaign work and fund-raising for stroke victims. But she did not give up acting. Indeed in later years she regretted that she was offered so few roles. In 1999 she did return to the screen, however, in Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune.

By then she was enjoying a new role, as head of a large and increasingly famous brood of children and grandchildren. Among the latter is Sophie Dahl, the model and actress, who had a relationship with Mick Jagger a decade ago, when she was 23 and Jagger 57. Patricia Neal, no stranger to big age gaps, called Jagger a “bastard”, even while admitting that she had never met him. “Sophie was a little angry with me,” she admitted.

Ultimately, however, she wished to be remembered not for gossip, or for the extraordinary turbulence of her personal life, but for her performances on stage and screen.

“I am an actress, and I will take any good part as long as I can stand up,” she said in 2005. “And when I can no longer do that, I will take them lying down.”

Patricia Neal is survived by her four children Tessa, Theo, Ophelia and Lucy. Roald Dahl died in 1990.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/film-obituaries/7935681/Patricia-Neal.html