Patricia Neal, Courageous Star of Stage and Screen, Dies at 84

Patricia Neal, a Tony- and Oscar-winning actress who resumed her career after suffering crippling strokes, died on August 8 of lung cancer at her home in Edgartown, Massachusetts. She was 84 and lived in New York City.

Born Patsy Lou Neal on January 20, 1926, the actress was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and attended Northwestern University for two years before moving to New York to begin her career. Before turning 21, Neal (rechristened “Patricia” by producer Alfred de Liagre) won a Tony and a Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut performance as Regina in Lillian Hellman’s 1946 drama Another Part of the Forest, a prequel to The Little Foxes. Her other Broadway credits included the 1952 revival of Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, the short-lived 1955 play A Roomful of Roses and the original 1961 Broadway production of The Miracle Worker, as Kate Keller. She also starred in an acclaimed London production of Suddenly Last Summer.

On the strength of her celebrated Broadway debut (including a Life magazine cover), Neal was signed to a seven-year contract at Warner Brothers, but her film career went off the rails when the 1949 big-screen adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead failed at the box office. She was welcomed back to Broadway by her mentor Hellman, who introduced her to the man who would become her husband, author Roald Dahl.

In the late 1950s, Neal bounced back in films that included Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (as George Peppard’s older lover) and an Oscar-winning performance as housekeeper Alma opposite Paul Newman in Hud. A year later, she suffered three strokes while pregnant with her fifth child. Comotose for three weeks, she safely delivered a baby girl several months later.

Neal’s considerable achievements as an actress were shadowed by the strokes and other tragedies in her personal life. In 1960, her baby son’s carriage was caught between a bus and a taxi, causing brain damage; in 1962, her oldest child died of measles encephalitis. Pushed by Dahl to enter intensive speech and physical therapy after her strokes, she returned to movies two years later in the film adaptation of Frank Gilroy's The Subject Was Roses, receiving another Oscar nomination. Her courageous journey was portrayed in a 1981 TV movie starring Glenda Jackson. She and Dahl divorced in 1983.

In the latter years of her career, Neal focused on TV, receiving three Emmy Award nominations for TV movies including The Waltons: The Homecoming. She continued to speak out on behalf of brain-injured children and adults.

Neal is survived by her children, Ophelia, Lucy, Theo and Tessa Dahl, and by several grandchildren, including model/author Sophie Dahl.