Patricia Neal

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

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

Born Patsy Louise Neal in Packard, Kentucky, she grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied drama at Northwestern University, before appearing on Broadway, and winning a Tony Award for Another Part of the Forest. 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 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<ref>Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life</ref> 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. Maria Cooper and Patricia Neal later reconciled.

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 Roald, Ophelia Magdalena, and Lucy Neal.

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). She later starred in A Face in the Crowd (1957) and co-starred in Breakfast At Tiffany's (1961).

She returned to Broadway in 1959 as the mother in The Miracle Worker. In 1963, Neal won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Hud, co-starring Paul Newman.

In 1965 Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurisms while pregnant, and was in a coma for three weeks. Roald directed her rehabiliation 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 and Dahl's stormy 30-year marriage finally ended in divorce in November 1983.

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.

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. In 1988 Neal published an autobiography, As I Am.

In June, 2006, Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life by Stephen Michael Shearer was published by the University Press of Kentucky.

She lives in New York City, and has a summer home on Martha's Vineyard.

1 Filmography
2 Television work
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Filmography

John Loves Mary (1949)
The Fountainhead (1949)
It's a Great Feeling (1949) (cameo)
The Hasty Heart (1949)
Bright Leaf (1950)
The Breaking Point (1950)
Three Secrets (1950)
Operation Pacific (1951)
Raton Pass (1951)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
Week-End with Father (1951)
Diplomatic Courier (1952)
Washington Story (1952)
Something for the Birds (1952)
Your Woman (1954)
Stranger from Venus (1954)
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
Hud (1963)
Psyche '59 (1964)
In Harm's Way (1965)
Pat Neal Is Back (1968) (short subject)
The Subject Was Roses (1968)
The Night Digger (1971)
Baxter! (1973)
Happy Mother's Day, Love George (1973)
B Must Die (1975)
Widow's Nest (1977)
The Passage (1979)
Ghost Story (1981)
An Unremarkable Life (1989)
Preminger: Anatomy of a Filmmaker (1991) (documentary)
Cookie's Fortune (1999)
From Russia to Hollywood: The 100-Year Odyssey of Chekhov and Shdanoff (1999) (documentary)
For the Love of May (2000) (short subject)
Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There (2003) (documentary)
Bright Leaves (2003) (documentary)