Actress Patricia Neal died 8 August 2010, apparently of the lung cancer she had been suffering. Born Patsy Lou Neal in Packard, Kentucky, on 20 January 1926, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be an actress. She won an Academy Award in 1964 for leading actress (for her role in Hud, with John Wayne), BAFTA Awards for best foreign actress for the role in Hud, and two years later, for her role in In Harm’s Way, and a Golden Globe in 1972 for her role in The Waltons: The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. She also earned nominations for another Oscar, three Emmys, and another Golden Globe.
At the age of 20, Neal made her acting debut on Broadway, in Another Part of the Forest, and she won her Tony Award for best featured actress in a play for that role. She then signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and went to Hollywood, where she debuted in John Loves Mary (1949), opposite Ronald Reagan. Within five years, she made 13 movies, and then Warner released her. She signed another contract, with Fox, and in 1951, had the female lead, Helen Benson, in the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still.
In 1952, she met author Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach), and married him the next year. The two had a sometimes troubled, 30-year marriage, which produced five children. Neal suffered a series of strokes in 1965 that left her partially paralyzed and with memory trouble, but Dahl drove her to work at her rehabilitation, and she managed a remarkable comeback. In her 1988 autobiography, As I Am, she wrote, “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.” They divorced in 1983 (he died in 1990).
According to The New York Times, “the story of her illness and recovery was made into a television movie, The Patricia Neal Story, in 1981, with Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde playing Pat and Roald.”
Her other genre roles include: Ghost Story (1981), Circle of Fear (1972), and Immediate Disaster (1954).
She is survived by four of her children, Tessa, Ophelia, Theo, and Lucy (her oldest daughter, Olivia, died of measles encephalitis at the age of 7); one brother and one sister; ten grandchildren and step grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.