Known for her hickory-smoked voice and the uncompromising honesty of her performances, Patricia Neal was born in Packard, Ky., in 1926 and educated at Northwestern University. She impressed as a young stage actress in New York, winning the very first Tony award for a featured actress in Another Part of the Forest. She signed with Warner Bros. in 1949 and appeared in a string of films during her two years at that studio - most notably the film version of the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead (1949), starring opposite Gary Cooper, who became her lover in real life as well as on the screen.

In 1953 Neal married British writer Roald Dahl and was absent from American screens for several years. She returned to excellent advantage in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957), playing a strong-willed talent agent who discovers and then destroys a country musician (Andy Griffith) who has turned into a demagogue. Neal won an Oscar® for her stringent, utterly believable portrait of the earthy housekeeper in Hud (1963), opposite Paul Newman.

Neal has been dogged by calamity in her personal life. Her infant son, Theo, was struck by a taxi and required years of therapy; her eldest daughter, Olivia, contracted measles encephalitis and died at the age of seven. In 1966, while at work on a film called Seven Women (in which she would be replaced by Anne Bancroft), Neal suffered a series of massive strokes.

Neal overcame partial paralysis and severely impaired speech in order to make a brilliant comeback in The Subject was Roses (1968). Though it earned her an Oscar® nomination, her subsequent work has been intermittent and of no great consequence compared to Roses and the films prior to her strokes. Perhaps her most notable later role was that of Olivia Walton in The Homecoming--A Christmas Story (CBS, 1971), the original movie pilot for the The Waltons series. Neal's courage had carried through other personal tragedies, the death of her daughter Olivia due to measles at age 13 and the eight brain operations her only son required after being hit by a taxi as a baby. The CBS TV-movie The Patricia Neal Story (1981) dramatized her remarkable recovery from her disabilities (with Glenda Jackson portraying her), and she has remained an inspiration for bravely conquering tremendous obstacles. In 1988, she published As I Am (written with Richard Deneut), a plain-speaking, seemingly honest autobiography imbued with the warmth and friendliness radiated by her screen persona.

Patricia Neal died from lung cancer on August 8th at the age of 84 in Edgarton, Massachusetts.

by Roger Fristoe