Patricia Neal (January 20, 1926–August 8, 2010)

Above, acting with Gary Cooper in the 1949 film “The Fountainhead.” 

``Patsy Lou Neal was born in the coal mining town of Packard, Ky., on Jan. 20, 1926, to a mine manager for the Southern Coke and Coal Company and the daughter of the town doctor. Ms. Neal was raised in Knoxville, Tenn. At 10, she attended an evening of monologues in the basement of the Methodist church and wrote a note to Santa Claus: “What I want for Christmas is to study dramatics.” By the time she entered high school, Patsy Neal was giving monologues at every Knoxville social club and had won the Tennessee State Award for dramatic reading.

In 1942, the summer before her senior year, she was chosen to apprentice at the prestigious Barter Theatre in Virginia. After two years as a drama major at Northwestern University, Ms. Neal learned that the Theatre Guild needed a tall girl to play the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and headed for New York. Alfred de Liagre, the producer of “Voice of the Turtle,” gave her a job understudying the two female leads and insisted that his patrician-looking new actress should call herself Patricia.

Success came quickly and easily. Ms. Neal replaced Vivian Vance in the road company of “Voice of the Turtle” and she had fourth billing in “Bigger than Barnum,” a Broadway-bound play that closed in Boston. When she played a backwoods girl who allies herself with the devil in “Devil Takes a Whittler” in summer stock in Westport, Conn, she was seen by everybody — including Eugene O’Neill, who became her mentor, and the Broadway theater community. In less than 24 hours, she had two offers to star on Broadway .. Ms. Neal turned down Richard Rodgers’ offer of the lead in “John Loves Mary” for “Another Part of the Forest.”

During her affair with Cooper, she became pregnant. She had an abortion and according to her 1988 autobiography, “As I Am,” she cried herself to sleep for 30 years afterward. “If I had only one thing to do over in my life,” she wrote, “I would have that baby.”Desperate to have children, she married Mr. Dahl even though, she wrote in her autobiography, she did not then love him. A complex and authoritarian former RAF fighter pilot who later became a renowned writer of edgy children’s books (”James and the Giant Peach,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), Mr. Dahl took control of Ms. Neal’s life. After son, Theo, was left brain-damaged when his pram was crushed between a taxicab and a bus on a New York street in December 1960, Mr. Dahl decided that they would move permanently to the village of Great Missenden in England. Two years later, their eldest daughter, Olivia, died of measles encephalitis, perhaps for want of sophisticated medical care that would have been available in a big city.. Ms. Neal survived the brain hemorrhages because of the knowledge Mr. Dahl had acquired during the years when Theo had eight brain operations. After the shunt that drained fluid from Theo’s brain kept clogging, Mr. Dahl worked for two years with a retired engineer and a neurosurgeon to design and manufacture a better one, the Wade-Dahl-Till valve.''

Taken from NYT.