A Life of Tragedy and Triumph: Patricia Neal (1926-2010)

Patricia Neal would never have been cast to play herself in The Patricia Neal Story. Her screen persona, in movies like The Fountainhead and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was one of elegance and hauteur. Even when the ice goddess thawed, as Paul Newman’s earthy housekeeper in Hud, which won her an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1964, Neal gave an edge to all those curves; here was a woman no man would easily mess with.

Off screen, the Knoxville, Tenn., native radiated a warm Southern gentility rarely seen in her movies. And in real life, especially over a few years in the 1960s, the actress who dished it out had to be the woman and mother who could take it. She endured a series of calamities: the brain damage her 4-month-old son Theo suffered when his carriage was crushed by a taxi; the death of her 7-year-old daughter Olivia after a bout of measles; and the three massive strokes one night in 1965 that left the pregnant Neal in a coma for three weeks and required years of therapy for her to be able to speak, walk and act again.

(From TIME’s Archives: After neurosurgery, Patricia Neal fights back from her strokes.)

No performer wants to be the star of her own tragedy; but Neal, who died Sunday at 84 on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, proved herself a towering figure of physical resiliency and emotional strength in surviving and rebounding from all her ordeals. She wasn’t the bitch on wheels of her film roles; she was really a gal named Job, a heroine named Pat.

Patsy Louise Neal, born in Packard, Ky., the daughter of a coal company executive and his wife, knew her calling from the age of 10, when she heard a touring actress recite monologues in a Methodist church. Her Christmas wish that year was for dramatic lessons, and she got them. After high school, she continued her theater studies at Northwestern. Going to Broadway at 20, she instantly landed a prize role (and won the very first Tony Award for a Supporting Actress) as Regina Hubbard in Another Part of the Forest, Lillian Hellman’s prequel to The Little Foxes. Regina had been played on stage by Tallulah Bankhead and in the movie version by Bette Davis — two stars Neal would soon be compared to, the first for the husky voice, the second for the take-charge attitude.

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Ah, that voice: a sultry blend of honey and vinegar, so sonorous that a man couldn’t help taking notice of its lure and challenge, and so deep it made Bankhead, by comparison, seem as if she had swallowed helium before speaking. In the mid-60s Tom Wolfe wrote of Manhattan women whose voices had “the golden richness of The New York Social Baritone, like that of a forty-eight-year-old male dwarf who just woke up after smoking three packs of Camels the day before.” Neal inhaled more than her share of cigarettes: the cause of her death was lung cancer. But her voice was a supple instrument that could register urban-sophisticate arrogance, an easy Southern charm and many shades in between.

In the ’40s, actors and actresses alike were valued for their mature voices. Lauren Bacall — another young star at Warner Bros., the studio that signed Neal to a movie contract in 1948 — had acquired her throaty pipes when Howard Hawks, her first director, ordered her to go out into the Hollywood Hills and spend a day shouting herself hoarse. Neal, though, had a womanly voice from childhood. As she recalled in a 2004 interview for Turner Classic Movies’ Private Screenings series, she was about 3 when a local 10-year-old girl, enraged by the taunting of Neal’s older sister and cousin, caught up with her. “She got a hold of me,” Neal told host Robert Osborne, “and she said, ‘I’ll just choke you, Miss Lady,’ which she did. And I screamed and screamed until my mother finally heard and came and saved my life. And that’s what I’ve been told is why I have a deep voice.”

Warner Bros. gave Neal star billing in her first picture: John Loves Mary, a comedy about a war wife who’s both eager for and anxious about her reunion with hubby Ronald Reagan. She then snagged a role that Davis and Barbara Stanwyck had both coveted: Dominique Francon, the headstrong heiress who falls under the spell of architect Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper, in Ayn Rand’s film version of her novel The Fountainhead. Ludicrous by the standards of naturalism — “Little effort is made to persuade us that these are real characters,” critic Michael Atkinson observes, “not just walking, ranting points of view” — the movie works as a full-bore evocation (or sly parody) of Rand’s Objectivist creed. Director King Vidor certifies Roark’s massive maleness with more phallic imagery (the erection of tall buildings, the drive of a rotary hammer drill) than might be found in a gay porn festival, and with chiaroscuro lighting that underlines the eroticism in every glance and gesture.

Coutured and made up to seem a younger, taller, lither Davis, Neal reads her early lines with a castrating wit, accompanied by the flinging of an eyebrow for emphasis. Even when lounging in a chaise, she has the animal attentiveness of a cougar stalking her prey. As the dominant Dominique, she begins her relationship with Roark by slashing his face with her riding crop. Soon she is surrendering to his defiance: beating her fists against his chest before locking him in a desperate kiss, twice crumbling to the floor in his presence, begging him to marry her, saying, “I’ll cook, I’ll wash your clothes, I’ll scrub the floor” — before he walks out, the stubborn Objectivist icon. So often in Hollywood’s post-war dramas, strong women had to crumble in the arms or at the feet of stronger men; their intelligence was seen to mask a neurosis that, to be cured, needed men as their Svengalis. The wonder is that Neal’s precocious craft makes Dominique a creature as plausible as she is passionate.

(See the legacy of Ayn Rand.)

Or, perhaps, no wonder, since Neal was giving the camera a glimpse at her own volcanic feelings. On the set, she had fallen hard for the married Cooper, a quarter-century her senior. “I loved him,” she told Osborne in 2004. “I thought he was the most ravishingly beautiful man I had ever seen. And I still think so.” She and Cooper had an affair no less intense than the one in The Fountainhead; and Cooper, like Roark, called all the shots. He refused to leave his wife. (His daughter Maria, believing Neal had stolen her father, spat at her. The two women were reconciled much later.) And according to Stephen Michael Shearer’s biography, Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life, Neal became pregnant by Cooper but underwent an abortion at his insistence. Yet, she said, he remained one of the two great loves of her life. The Fountainhead remained a bold statement of Cooper and Neal’s forbidden love.

(See TIME’s 1961 obit of Gary Cooper.)

Released from her Warner Bros. contract in 1951, Neal went to 20th Century Fox, where, in The Day the Earth Stood Still, she got to utter the immortal extraterrestrial phrase, “Klaatu Barada Nikto” and co-star with Michael Rennie in one of the first human-alien love stories. But what should have been her prime movie decade was mostly a wash; her one significant mid-’50s role was for director Elia Kazan, as the cynical reporter monitoring the rise of a television despot (Andy Griffith) in Budd Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd.

At that time, Neal had other priorities. While starring on Broadway in a 1952 revival of Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, she attended a party given by the playwright. There she met the Anglo-Norwegian writer Roald Dahl, just making his name as the author of devilishly clever short stories (and later renowned for the children’s books James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Matilda and The Witches). As her dinner-table mate, he annoyed her by ignoring her, and a few days later she turned down his request for a date. But he pursued and married her; eventually they had five children, and stayed together for 30 years, until Dahl confessed to a long-term adulterous affection and Neal said goodbye.

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Mother first, actress second, Neal took supporting roles in The Miracle Worker on Broadway and Breakfast at Tiffany’s on film. Viewers of this Audrey Hepburn valentine may forget that her beau, played by George Peppard, is a male prostitute — the original Manhattan midnight cowboy. Neal took the “other woman” role of his most demanding client. Suitably cool and cruel, she has one terrific scene where she spells out the economics of their relationship with a crispness Paul Krugman would admire.

(See TIME’s original 1961 review of Breakfast at Tiffany’s)

How could Neal, with her family obligations in the remote English village Dahl had chosen, accept the role of Alma in the 1963 Hud? Martin Ritt, the film’s director, promised to schedule her scenes in two clumps. Neal said yes, and won an Oscar for Best Actress. The role of housekeeper for the cattle-raising Bannons — Homer the patriarch (Melvyn Douglas), Hud the wastrel (Paul Newman) and his kid brother Lon (Brandon De Wilde) — was a supporting part, really, but she invested it with a dusty authenticity rarely seen in movies of the day. Dust-caked and straggle-haired, in a sleeveless housedress and wearing no visible makeup, she looks sexier, more gorgeous and desirable than ever, because her Alma is the total woman, too honest to kid herself or any guy. However roughly life and men have treated her, she wears her emotional battle scars like Medals of Honor. Neal gets all this through to the viewer with a slouching posture, a tired smile and, mainly, through the actor’s alchemy of transforming performance into a living being.

(See TIME’s original 1963 review of Hud)

Alma’s seen-it-all sexuality might make her the female equivalent to Paul Newman’s Lone Star stud, if only Texas women in the early ’60s had the same freedom as men. As attracted to Hud as every other woman in town, Alma knows from hard experience not to cuddle up to a viper. In a wonderful scene in her bedroom, Hud flirts with Alma after she’s won a few dollars playing cards with the other ranch hands. She allows that “I’m a good poker player,” and he says, “You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a good cook. You’re a good laundress.” And, with a salacious smile: “What else you good at?” All this time, Hud is lying on her bed, fondling a long-stemmed rose; he’s the coquette and she’s the one too wary and weary to get involved. When he finally exasperates her to quit her job, she gets on the next bus out of town. “I’ll remember you, honey,” he says. “You’re the one that got away.”

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Another reason Neal’s performance here is exceptional: she wasn’t the self-sufficient Alma. “I trusted my instincts completely when I was acting,” she wrote in her autobiography As I Am. “I rarely did in real life.” She was drawn to strong men who told her what to do. Dahl, her husband — no less than Roark with Dominique, or Cooper with Neal — ran her life. And once or twice, he saved it. She told Osborne that, when she had the first of her strokes, Dahl knew which doctor to call, which hospital to get her to; he pushed the physicians to keep her going; when they said she’d likely die, he virtually willed her to survive; then he steered her through the years of therapy that kept her alive and restored her speech and mobility. And then — knowing that, as she has often said, “I’m an actress from beginning to end” — he made her go back to work.

“He’s the one that shoved me into it,” she said of her husband’s insistence that she take the role of Nettie Cleary in the film version of Frank Gilroy’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Subject Was Roses. The play’s director, Ulu Grosbard, had wanted Neal for Nettie, but she was in Hollywood. Now, three years after her strokes, she was available. Like Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Nettie is a woman whose life is defined by the bitter belief that she settled for second best in her choice of a man. Now, after 20-some years with her husband John (Jack Albertson), her rancor keeps exploding, the pus splattering their son Timmy (Martin Sheen), just back from the war.

Neal’s blistering performance is allowed just one ray of grace: a memory of a boy who, too shy to romance her, instead inadvertently gave her “the most beautiful black eye you ever saw!” As she soars briefly into that sweet, long-ago moment, her sour face turns beatific with a blushing smile — then collapses as she returns to the Hell of her reality. It’s powerful, subtle work from a woman who recently had been given up for dead.

“At the end of that film,” she told Osborne, “I was the happiest woman alive!” Neal was 42 when she made The Subject Was Roses, and lived another 42 years, but that was her last gasp as a great actress. Glenda Jackson, another fiercely intelligent actress, played Neal in the 1981 TV movie The Patricia Neal Story, with Dirk Bogarde as Dahl.

In As I Am, Neal wrote, “Time passes so quickly, and we endure many crises — life, death and great, great pain.” For once this was not a star’s self-pitying grandiosity. Neal had her own unique strength; she forced herself to live, to return to motherhood, to relearn the rudiments of her craft and dig inside to find the art buried in there. Few actresses can say their career was an inspiration, fewer still that their life was a tragedy with a triumphant ending. In her drawling, seductive voice, Patricia Neal could say both.

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