Patricia Neal was one of the 20th century’s most gifted actresses of stage and screen. Her life, though, was a Greek tragedy, transformed by God’s healing love.
She was born 100 years ago today — christened “Patsy Louise” — in Packard, Kentucky, the coal country hometown of her “earnest, warm-hearted” mother, Eura Mildred Petrey, whose husband and life-long-love, larger-than-life William Burdette “Coot” Neal, was raised on a tobacco plantation in Southern Virginia.
“Remember what the psalmist says,” she wrote in her memoir, recalling what “Pappy,” the town doctor, would tell his granddaughter. “He changes desert into pools of water.”
A born actress, Patsy Louise, seeing “a glorious lady giving monologues,” realized, “that’s all I wanted to do.” By Christmas 1937, living in Knoxville with her family, now studying drama, she wrote, “My monologues graduated from the front yard to Aunt Maude’s drawing room and my audiences were growing…”
A summer apprenticeship at Robert Porterfield’s well-known Barter Theatre and move to New York solidified her desire to act. But her family lured her back from sin city to study at Northwestern University, where she grieved, freshman year, the death by cardiac arrest of “daddy” — “the rock upon which anything good about me has been built.”
Studying another year at Northwestern, she finally returned to New York, landing an understudy role in The Voice of the Turtle and, along with it, her new name — “Patricia,” which the producer Alfred de Liagre thought matched her regal manner.
“Applause,” she writes, “was love. It was approval by everybody. And I bathed in it.”
She also wanted the real thing.
In New York, at age 19, her first boyfriend, the son of a doctor who procured abortions, told her he loved her more than anyone else. So she traded in her virginity for love. When he dumped her for his virginal high school sweetheart, she was deeply wounded.
She took that wound and rose to theatrical heights, then headed for Hollywood, famously landing the lead in The Fountainhead (1949) and falling in love with Gary Cooper (“Coop”), her very handsome and very married co-star. The affair, during which she became pregnant, was stressful for all involved.
By 1951, both the affair and pregnancy having ended, Hollywood shunned her, after which she returned East for the stage and met and married the children’s author Roald Dahl, though still hopelessly in love with Coop.
Then, too, Dahl was not exactly a step up when it came to committed love, as the new podcast produced by Ron Howard's film company, Imagine, reveals; and the marriage had predictable bumps in the road — Roald asking for a divorce the first year given his hurt male ego: Patricia was successful; he was not.
Crisis somehow averted, their children began making their grand entrances and Roald started thriving as a writer of children’s books. But their joy turned to sorrow in December 1960 when baby Theo, their third child, was struck by a taxi as the family au pair was pushing him in a stroller along a New York City street.
As Theo's damaged brain recovered, aided by Roald’s development of a therapeutic intervention, both career and family life blossomed anew: Patricia played Mrs. Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and they continued settling into a marvelous life in their white cottage with lush gardens at Great Missenden, not far from London, where they had moved back, as, charmingly, Roald began testing out his stories on his children, and writing hits.
Then, Olivia, just seven, not qualifying for a scarce measles vaccine, tragically died of the disease on November 17, 1962.
As they gradually picked up the pieces of their again shattered lives, Patricia landed the role of Alma Brown in Hud (1963), for which she won the Best Actress Oscar, after which she gave birth to her fourth child in May 1964.
But, no rest for the weary, she returned to work in early 1965 to make John Ford’s Seven Women. One evening, home from the set — once again pregnant, secretly so — Roald, as usual, prepared her a martini after which she went up to bathe her seven-year-old. A few minutes later, while lathering her baby down, she suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms.
It was February 17, 1965.
Only 39, she was in a coma for three weeks.
“Tennessee hillbillies don’t conk that easy,” she famously wrote of her miraculous recovery.
Meanwhile, one day, as she was suffering intense blues, the postman brought her a letter, the envelope to which was “inscribed with noble hand.” It was from Maria Cooper. While Roald later burned it, she could never forget the key sentence in Maria’s letter — “I forgive you.”
This thoughtful, grace-filled letter was so healing for Patricia, and soon thereafter, on August 4, 1965, she gave birth to a baby girl, Lucy Neal.
By 1968, incredibly, she was back, playing the role of Nettie in The Subject Was Roses, about a troubled marriage. Ironically so, for Roald was having an affair with a younger woman — finally ending his marriage with Patricia in 1982 in humiliating fashion.
Nonetheless God would continue to “change desert into pools of water.”
Maria had introduced Patricia to the Abbey of Regina Laudis in 1978, where her friend and Coop’s godmother, Mother Dolores Hart, had lived as a Benedictine cloistered nun for 15 years. The fruits of Mother Dolores’ prayer were immense. For it was there that Patricia gained great peace and learned she could love Coop spiritually.
When Roald unceremoniously kicked her out, she was intent on writing a tell-all book. But Mother Benedict Duss, the Abbey Prioress, told her she would “never get better” with such “ugliness.” So it was that Patricia gradually healed as she dictated her life story to Mother Dolores who, some 1,200 pages later, had the raw material of her memoir, As I Am: An Autobiography.
Patricia gave back in so many ways, helping other stroke victims and going back to the Abbey every chance she got — e.g., doing summer stock and signing books.
One day, Mother Dolores recounted, Patricia said, “You know, I’m going to become a Catholic before I die. It will just be when I die.’ I said, ‘You can’t do that to God.’ And she said, ‘Why can’t I do that to God?’”
“It was about a day before she died that she converted,” said Mother Dolores.
In 1990, Patricia finally decided to call Roald. November 17 was “the last time I hung up on my love,” she writes — coincidentally the anniversary of Olivia’s death.
Patricia Neal died on August 8, 2010, of lung cancer at age 84 in her beloved Martha’s Vineyard. “Her grave is in the abbey cemetery right next to my grandmother and my mother’s,” which she chose as her final resting place, said Mother Dolores of her “best friend.”
Excerpted and condensed from the story told in Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends
