Patricia Neal is also the birth name of novelist, actress, and screenwriter Fannie Flagg.
Patricia Neal (born January 20, 1926, Packard, Kentucky) is an Academy Award winning American actress.
Born Patsy Louise Neal, Patricia Neal grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. She studied drama at Northwestern University, before moving to New York, where, after only a few months, she got her first job (an understudy in the Broadway production of The Voice of the Turtle). Soon, though, she appeared in Another Part of the Forest (1946), winning a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Play. 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 co-star, Gary Cooper, whom she had met two years earlier, when he was 46 and she was 21. By 1950, Cooper's wife, Veronica, 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 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. Years after Cooper's death, Maria and her mother Veronica reconciled with Patricia Neal.
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, Chantal Tessa Sophia, Theo Matthew (b. 1960), Ophelia Magdalena, and Lucy Neal (b. 1965).
By 1952, Neal had starred in The Breaking Point, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Operation Pacific (the last with John Wayne). She suffered a nervous breakdown around that time, following the end of her relationship with Cooper, and left Hollywood for New York, where she returned to Broadway in a revival of The Children's Hour, in 1952. (She also acted in A Roomful of Roses in 1955, and as the mother in The Miracle Worker in 1959.)
In films, she starred in A Face in the Crowd (1957) and co-starred in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). In 1961 and 1962 she suffered the death of one child and a grievous injury to another. Her daughter Olivia died from measles and her son Theo's carriage was hit by a taxi when he was just four months old.
In 1963, Neal won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Hud, co-starring Paul Newman. Two years later, she was reunited with John Wayne in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way.
Later in 1965, Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant, and was in a coma for three weeks. Dahl directed her rehabilitation 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 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. Neal played a dying widowed mother trying to find a home for her three children in a moving 1975 episode of NBC's Little House on the Prairie.
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. Neal and Dahl's stormy 30-year marriage finally ended in divorce in November 1983 after Dahl's affair with Neal's then-best friend, Felicity Crosland. In 1988 Neal published an autobiography, As I Am.
She lives in New York City, and owns a house on Martha's Vineyard.
