Patricia Neal

Had a stroke. Many said this improved her acting.

My favorite of her roles:

No one said that, idiot at R1.

Apparently an Oscar for her bravura performance in HUD prior to the stroke is something you just pretend didn't exist. Even THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES and COOKIE'S FORTUNE don't touch it.

Yeah Op, she was an excellent actress indeed.

...

The Patricia Neal Story (TV 1981)

Patricia Neal was a first-rate actress and a sensual broad.

After her stroke she did TV ads for Anacin, with the slogan "Fight pain and win!" When I was a kid that was one of the first artifacts of camp I remember identifying.

She was very beautiful even into old age.

[quote]When I was a kid that was one of the first artifacts of camp I remember identifying.

I hope your later "artifacts" were higher quality than that.

"Do y'all wanna see my Christmassss caaaaactusss?"

Her husband, Roald Dahl, was an awful, awful husband to her.

She was the downright Lindsay Lohan in Liz and Dick when she walked her way through The Fountainhead.

Yes, but she had the pleasure of enjoying Gary Cooper's 'horse sized cock', as it's always described, for many years. As did I .

I saw her strolling down Lexington Ave. one afternoon in the late 1990's, she looked gorgeous, and of course, impeccably dressed.

Patricia Neal, Cherry Jones, and Kathy Bates are Tennessee's finest actors bar none. I always thought that was neat.

Patricia Neal was one tough chick who seemed to have lived a very full life. I wonder if she ever hung out with Ava Gardner? I am reading a book about Frank Sinatra and Ava Garder is made out to be a size queen of all things so I can't help but wonder if Patricia Neal and Ava Garder ever hung out and compared notes on a thing or two. Two Southerners. Both size queens. Know what I mean?

At any rate. Patricia Neal was just epic. Loved her. Vaguely recall the t.v. movie about her as well. I don't think there is anyone in acting who is like her at all, she was very original.

Friends of mine knew her in her later years and loved her, said she was very funny.

But, OP, the AMC guy didn't say "Damned good actress." What he said was "Damned. Good. Acress."

[quote]I hope your later "artifacts" were higher quality than that.

Well, I was 8. It got better.

[quote] I can't help but wonder if Patricia Neal and Ava Garder ever hung out and compared notes on a thing or two. Two Southerners. Both size queens. Know what I mean?

Most people don't choose their acquaintances the way you seem to imagine.

R12, how he was awful to her?

R20, more like how wasn't he? Dahl was an alcoholic. Always cheated on her.

Omg R21 really? When i was a kid i was reading his books with so much pleasure. I really loved 'The Witches', 'Matilda', 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and 'The BFG'. To me he is known for the books he wrote for children, i had no idea that he was also a drunkard and a cheater. Lol!

Dahl was all that--but she did credit him with working tirelessly with her to recover from the stroke.

She was one of my favorites. I saw "7 Women" on TCM yesterday, and I read she was originally supposed to do the Anne Bancroft role--she would have been great.

So many memorable performances, but the one that always gets me is from The Christmas Miracle (later the basis for The Waltons) when Patricia Neal comes up the basement stairs holding a blooming Christmas cactus and says in that throaty voice, "Anybody want to see something purdy?". That was my Mama right there. I'm tearing up even as I type this.

"The Homecoming," R24.

After her stroke, her fans came to love her slight slurring and "juicy mouth."

Post stroke, rare is the scene when she is not holding a tissue to surreptitiously wipe away her excess saliva.

Roald Dahl was a typical stoic Norgeman during her recovery.

How was Dahl awful to her? Well, one article described him as a "serial womaniser and ruthlessly detached, cold-blooded character capable of emotional cruelty."

He was a very intelligent, witty man; he could be very charming and sexy (I never could get his appeal, but apparently women went for him). But he could also be insufferably rude and thoughtless and cruel. After an instance where he behaved like a dick, she seriously considered breaking off their engagement. But she was in her mid-twenties, wanted a family and he seemed like a good prospect, so she married him.

He was always very nasty to her family. He looked down on them for being ordinary Southern people. He considered himself superior.

After her strokes he treated her quite brutally; it was a king of "tough love", I guess. Later she said his treatment motivated her, but it was still hard to take.

She was doing those coffee commercials when a female wardrobe assistant was assigned to her. She was a younger woman named Felicity Crosland. They became good friends; Crosland was a frequent visitor to her home and was always bringing her and her children gifts. Later Neal realized that was doing her best to ingratiate herself into her family. Neal was still recovering from her strokes; it took a while but finally she realized that her husband and her "best friend" had been carrying on a torrid affair right under her nose for quite some time. EVERYBODY knew what was going on except for poor Pat.

When Neal found out about the affair Dahl and Crosland cooled it for a while. Neal thought it was over, but after a terrible Christmas holiday one of her daughters told her that Dahl was still seeing Felicity Crosland. Dahl said "that's right, I am" and walked out of the room. Neal knew it was finally over and they eventually divorced.

After they divorced, Dahl married Crosland. He and Crosland always made a big deal about how smitten they were with each other, which rubbed salt into Neal's wounds. Yes, Roald Dahl was a HORRID man.

I bartended at the premier party for "Cookie's Fortune", at the now torn down supperclub, Laurabelle. Ms. Neal sat at the bar for awhile and we chatted. I told her how much I enjoyed her work. She took my hand, thanked me, and was utterly warm and gracious. Sam Shepard was there too that night, and was very polite. He also tipped which is uncommon at such closed events.

R27, thank you very much for writing all this. Sharing is caring. :)

R28, that' so cool! Lucky you.

Always wondered why she would take a supporting role on Broadway in The Miracle Worker.

Anyone know?

R30, sorry, i don't know sweetie. Maybe someone else could answer though...

Below is Patricia Neal in 'The Fountainhead'. One of her best performances!

Sally Forrest, Marge Champion, Patricia Neal, and Debbie Reynolds playing with bubble gum cigars, c. 1950s.

Patricia in 1949

R7 here is similar photo to yours of sensual Patricia.

Yes, she was sensual indeed!

It was NOT a stroke! Just Bell's Palsy!

Patricia Neal with Ava Gardner

With Joan...

I like Patricia Neal. She was not a big fake like other Hollywoood actresses were.

She had a perfect chemistry with Paul Newman in 'Hud'. What a pity they didn't play together in another movie.

A tender article about Patricia

Dahl seemed like a dick for hating the first Chocolate Factory adaptation, and preventing them from filming a planned sequel. One of the things that infuriated him about it was the belching in the Fizzy Lifting scene. That wasn't in his book and he thought it was outrageously uncooth. What a priss.

*kisses R41 unreasonably...

Hmm......

I don't know much about her or her work, but saw Hud on a Paul spree and obviously I was interested in her and she was amazing, among the best actress wins.

OK so she was supporting but she was the main female in the cast so presumably that was the rationale. It seemed to bring a bit more realism picking up where Sophia Loren left off the previous year.

I had read that her Oscar was a sympathy one a la Butterfield 8 or something and like Liz she suffered long standing health problems. But that was definitely a justified win.

Hud is fantastic, perhaps even better than The Hustler. And here we have the most realistic Paul role, playing against type but that's how you would expect him to be.

Hud is much better than The Hustler.

Gort. Klaatu Varada Nikto!!!!!!!!!

Ladies it was horrid what her husband did to her, but, how do you think Mrs. Cooper felt over what Patricia did to her?

I always say that too, R46, but am told that I am too bourgeois to "understand".

Barbara Stanwyck was the actress to campaigned to have The Fountainhead made into a film - she and Ayn Rand both belong to some anti-Commie group called Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals...Rand liked Barbara but thought her too hard-edged for the role of Dominique. And Jack Warner bluntly told her that she was too old at 40 to play the part. Stanwyck was very bitter about it for years.

I hear she tried out for the part of Mary Poppins.

Grace Kelly

Spencer Tracey

ooh Vincente Minnelli

typical Hollywood story

dad

gaud

actress

"Ladies it was horrid what her husband did to her, but, how do you think Mrs. Cooper felt over what Patricia did to her?"

Apparently Veronica "Rocky" Cooper was not much threatened by Patricia Neal. She had an "open" marriage with Cooper; he had lots of affairs but she knew he'd never divorce her. He had the perfect set-up; a beautiful, accomplished, classy wife who accepted the fact that he was unfaithful to her and dealt with it. She did whatever she wanted too; I guess it worked out for both of them.

Patricia Neal believed that she and Gary Cooper had a "great love." He was the love of her life; he told her he loved her and it seemed serious. She got pregnant; he took her to get an abortion. He told his wife about the abortion. Neal said that "if I had been older and wiser, I would have realized that Gary had no reason to tell Rocky about the abortion unless he was going to stay with her. He was not going to pick up my option."

Has anyone seen Psyche 59? Pat plays blind and the role strangely forecasts the disabling effects of her future strokes. The film is badly directed for the most part, but she is wonderful in it.

"I had read that her Oscar was a sympathy one a la Butterfield 8 or something and like Liz she suffered long standing health problems."

She won the Oscar before she had the strokes. After she recovered from the strokes (she had to learn to walk and talk all over again and her mind was never the same) she made a remarkable comeback and was nominated for an Oscar for "The Subject Was Roses", but didn't win.

Her memoir "As I Am" is a great read. It's very honest. She was a hell of a woman.

Irene Dailey (Aunt Liz, Another World) originated the role of the mother in The Subject Was Roses on Broadway.

In film version both Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen repeated their stage roles. But Irene was replaced by Patricia.

I met Patricia Neal only a few years before she died, and I was afraid of gushing about how wonderful I thought she was.

Her husband was a cad, also a rabid anti-Semite who insanely believed that all publishers were Jews who had conspired to ruin his career. (What might if have been, if he considered that career a run?)

I went to PS 6 in Manhattan. It's on Madison Avenue, running from 81st to 82nd Street. That enabled me to watch some great funerals across the street at Frank Campbell's. Anyway, Dahl and Neal had an apartment at 28 East 81st (subsequently sublet to Dick Cavett and Carrie Nye, who might be seen as a Neal wannabe). The building was diagonally across the street from the school. Our shades were drawn and we were forbidden to look out the windows immediately after Neal's son Theo's carriage was struck by a car in the intersection of 81st and Madison. The baby suffered brain damage. Dahl explained that ever since Neal's stroke he had carried the phone number of a neuro-surgeon around in his wallet, and that immediate access to care saved Theo's life. Dahl is also credited as part-inventor of a shunt that relieved the pressure from fluid on Theo's brain. He was a bastard, but a good children's author and probably saved the lives of Neal and Theo Dahl.

[quote]if he considered that career a run

Oops. A RUIN

Yes, Dahl was a sadistic bastard. Probably the worst mistake Patricia Neal ever made in her life was marrying him.

"Always wondered why she would take a supporting role on Broadway in The Miracle Worker."

Her Hollywood career had waned (her last big role was in A FACE IN THE CROWD, but it was not a commercial success) and she was mostly doing TV guest appearances.

Her role as Kate Keller was her last Broadway appearance.

She was the kind of actress that didn't really fit the typical Hollywood mold. HUD completely revitalized her career but only for a short period given her stroke.

Interestingly enough, Anne Bancroft's Hollywood career had fizzled as well before she did MIRACLE WORKER, and the film version turned her career around.

I always thought that Neal and Bancroft would make an interesting combination - wonder how they got along?

57 posts & no mention of her small, but sharp role in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANYS, as George Peppard's sugar mommy.

Otherwise, most loved her in HUD & THE SUBJECT WAS ROSES.

Always thought of her a just mesmerizing onscreen. An "actor's actor" & a no nonsense broad in the best sense of the term.

Others in that no nonsense category for me, would include Stanwyck, Davis, Crawford & Colleen Dewhurst.

"I AM a very stylish girl"

Spoken by Patricia Neal in Breakfast at Tiffany's. One of my favorite lines in the film.

[quote]I always thought that Neal and Bancroft would make an interesting combination - wonder how they got along?

I believe they were close friends. I seem to remember Patricia Neal referring to her as such in more than one interview.

And also in her autobiography. Makes me laugh when she considers that Anne did her a favour by taking over her role in Seven Women.

It's too bad AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY didn't exist when Neal was around. She would have nailed Violet in a way Streep could never do.

One of the reasons Neal took the supporting role in The Miracle Worker was because she thought she might be given the Annie Sullivan role after Anne Bancroft left the show. Patricia ended up doing the play only a short time before leaving. Suzanne Pleshette would replace Anne.

She always regretted her abortion and became very publicly pro life. She also bonded with Cooper's daughter.

Anyone else think she resembles Kate Mulgrew?

She was commencement speaker when I received my MA in speech from Northwestern. She was escorted out by the Dean and then gave a lovely, warm speech. Much more moving than Charlton Heston the year before, who spoke whenI got my bachelors degree.

I loved her and thought she always just seemed like a great broad. She projected great strength of character too, being the kind of actress who could stand toe to toe with John Wayne, which she did in two different films. I also loved her in "The Homecoming", simply because she reminded me a lot of my Virginia grandmother.

Patricia Neal's book "As I Am" is one of the best books I've ever read. She had an amazing life and she comes across as a woman who is trying to tell her story as close to the unvarnished truth as she can. I think she prided herself on her honesty and it comes across in her writing.

"Coffee with character" when I was a little boy a took a cushion off the couch, wrapped around my neck and did an imitation of her commercial.

Hud is one of my favorite films, and I saw her in something that played in a film noir festival, her character had blonde hair.

Loved her, couldn't sit through The Fountainhead

Dahl was a bastard. But his selfishness and cruelty paid off for Neal in some unexpected ways. He pushed her ruthlessly to do the therapy and rehab work to relearn the basic skills of walking, talking, and feeding herself. She would crawl to the bathroom in the night before she learned to walk again for fear of waking him. But she made a remarkable recovery.

He pushed her to go public with the details of her stroke and her recovery, probably to make up for her lost earnings as an actor, and it was a huge gamble in the 1960s when no celebrity talked publically about strokes. But it paid off - she became an advocate and a spokesperson. Instead of becoming a pariah, she was able to get work again as an actor.

Dahl encourage her to go on long speaking tours - for his own selfish reasons related to his infidelity. But in those speaking tours, she connected with people who needed to hear her story and it became incredibly rewarding for her.

When their marriage finally ended and Dahl drove her to the airport with their children (Neal was going back to the U.S.; Dahl and her children, who had felt abandoned by her after her stroke, were staying in England). She could hear Dahl mocking her as she walked away from the car, and even worse, she could hear her own children laughing at her along with him. But she outlived Dahl and she repaired her relationship with her children. She had an amazing life and it's even more wonderful to read and hear her story in her own words.

I also loved As I Am. She wrote it at the Abbey of Regina Laudis with Mother Dolores Hart as editor. Interesting place. She converted to Catholicism on her death bed.

Patricia Neal liked and respected Paul Newman tremendously as an actor. This story is from IMDB but I think Neal also relates it in her autobiography:

Early on Paul Newman and Patricia Neal had a rare opportunity to hang out poolside at their motel in Texas. Neal found herself opening up emotionally about her daughter Olivia, who had died suddenly just months earlier of measles encephalitis. After her long outpouring, Newman stared at her for a long moment, then simply uttered "tough" and walked away. She was taken aback by his reaction. It was early in production, and they had not yet done a major scene together, so she hadn't really gotten to know him well or to understand his methods. Later on in the shoot, however, she realized he was already very much in character as Hud. Neal didn't hold a grudge and later said she and Newman worked together beautifully.

Totally did not deserve the Oscar for HUD. At least for Lead Actress. She was a supporting role. Only 25 minutes of screen time in an hour and fifty-two minute film.

Furthermore, in the book HORSEMAN, PASSY BY her character is a black woman, so by casting a white woman the film sidesteps a racial dimension that the novel brings to the story.

Patricia Neal was particularly proud of one unscripted moment that made it into the movie HUD. While talking to Hud about her failed marriage, a huge horsefly flew onto the set. Just as she says she's "done with that cold-blooded bastard," she zaps the fly with a dish towel. Martin Ritt loved it and printed the take.

Neal said she improvised that part of the scene in the moment, having grown up killing flies in Tennessee. She found it hilarious that her snapping that big fly with deadly accuracy with her dish towel contributed as much as anything to helping her win the Oscar for her role in HUD.

Oh yeah R73, Patricia Neal and Paul Newman are totally responsible for America not being prepared to deal with an interracial romance in a major movie in 1963. Thank you for finally judging them and finding them guilty of bigotry. (I wonder if we can take back their awards?)

R75 A PATCH OF BLUE was just two years later, and Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman shared a mouth-to-mouth kiss. This was also two years before the Supreme Court declared miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

That's lovely, R76, "A Patch of Blue" was a movie about an interracial relationship between a black man and a white blind woman, who didn't know he was black. See hothat works.

Hollywood movie studios generally set out to make movies that will make a profit - they're amoral that way - the profit is the thing they care about. Do you seriously believe that they could've made a movie about an anti-hero, like Hud, a cynical ne'er-do-well Texan whose utter contempt for humanity threatens to denigrate and destroy all his relationship, then just slip in an interracial relationship in 1963 and not have the controversy about the interracial relationship overshadow the entire film? In 1963, the Civil Right movement was at its height. Casting Alma as a black woman would've been a great idea if they'd wanted to make a movie about race in 1963.

Jane Fonda, the entire cast and crew of the movie "Hurry Sundown" had to leave the town in Louisiana where they were filming because of the outrage when the local newspaper ran a photo of Jane Fonda kissing a black child on the cheek - that was in 1967. Either you weren't alive in the 1960s or you're incredibly naive.

But apart from the issue of how casting a black actress as Alma would've affected the movie HUD. it was a studio decision. They hire actors like Patricia Neal to play the roles that are written - not to cast the movies.

In the excellent "As I Am", she relates her friendship in later years with Gary Cooper's daughter, Maria Cooper Janis.

[quote]That's lovely, [R76], "A Patch of Blue" was a movie about an interracial relationship between a black man and a white blind woman, who didn't know he was black. See hothat works.

Yes, she didn't realize he was black, but she is eventually told the truth and doesn't care. When she kisses him on the mouth, it's not just a kiss and he also necks her a little bit. Very sensual.

Granted, that scene was cut for viewing in the South, but the film was still a smash hit for MGM, the 14th highest grossing film of the year.

She was so good in "A Face in The Crowd". It's like you could see the betrayal slowly unfold on her face. If you took Barbara Stanwyck's idealism in "Meet John Doe" but gave it a more cynical, realistic spin at the end of the project, you'd be left with the perfect confusion found on Neal's character's face in "A Face in The Crowd".

It's what happens when you objectify people, even with noble intentions and it's a film every idealist should see. Sometimes you create a monster, without meaning to.

One of Neal's later films was "The Night Digger" in 1971.

She gives a good performance as does Pamela Brown as her mother.

Of course this was also the film debut of a young Nicholas Clay in which he showed his cock & ass.

The Fountainhead is unwatchable. Barbara Stanwyck dodged a bullet when she got turned down for that role.

The Subject Was Abortions

She overheard people running her down on the set of "The Night Digger" and wasn't too happy about it.

Bump for original thread.

She was a very stylish girl.

Yeah. There was always just something so sexy about her even as an older woman. Her voice was wondeful and she was a fighter. Her interview with Robert Osborne some years ago was very interesting..

Not much range. She always played Patricia Neal.

She was perfection in Hud and I don't give a fuck for who thinks differently.

R88, you don't know shit about acting so STFU. Patricia Neal was one of the best.

Plain Jane. Great skin, though.

Was there ever a good reason given as to why she wasn't asked to reprise Olivia Walton, for The Waltons. She was fabulous in The Homecoming. Was there a problem with insuring her due to the stroke, or did the network/studio feel she wouldn't be up to a weekly series? I believe that Ellen Corby and the children were the only ones kept from the film.

"i had no idea that he was also a drunkard and a cheater."

I don't think he was a drunk. But he WAS an incorrigible adulterer. He was also anti-semitic. And insufferably rude. A real bastard. But he WAS very intelligent, imaginative and good with children. In book Neal said when the first met him she instantly disliked him. But a friend gave him her number, he called her and kept after her to go out with him so she did. She found him handsome (I never thought he was) and interesting. She eventually met his family and on seeing photos of babies in his family she believed that he would make "beautiful babies." She wanted to get married and have a family, so she married him. Their marriage turned out to be a big mistake. They were NOT suited to each other. I guess they figured it would be the right thing to do at the time. The marriage lasted a long time but ended horribly; he dumped her for a younger woman who she considered to be a dear friend. He and the other woman had been having an affair right under her nose; preoccupied with recovering from a stroke and getting back into acting again, she didn't notice, how, uh, CLOSE her husband and her friend were getting. She found out about the affair and it seemed like it was over. But she later found out Dahl had taken up with her "friend" again, and the marriage was over. I think marrying him was probably the biggest mistake she made in her life.