RIP Patricia Neal

Patricia Neal’s personal life often overshadowed her acting career.  She first hit the international headlines for having an affair with Gary Cooper, getting pregnant to him whilst making “The Fountainhead” in 1949.  Cooper was a notorious womaniser who usually slept with his leading ladies - silent star Clara Bow once remarked that he was “hung like a horse and could keep going all night” - but the relationship with Neal was so serious that it nearly broke up his marriage.  Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway himself talked Cooper out of a divorce.

Neal’s own eventual marriage was much celebrated.  Her husband was the English writer Roald Dahl.  They had five children, losing two in tragic circumstances.  Whilst pregnant in 1965 Neal endured a series of strokes. Her subsequent recovery and resumption of her acting career ranks amongst the cinema’s most inspirational stories.

Neal won an Oscar in 1963 for “Hud”, playing an older woman having an affair with Paul Newman.  It wasn’t the first time she had been so cast:
perhaps her best known role was as the rich keeper of George Peppard who loses him to Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”.

Neal was even better as the radio producer who discovers and falls in love with Andy Griffith in the Elia Kazan masterpiece “A Face in the Crowd”.  It is a performance of subtle sensuality, the warm heart of a film about the gullibility and prejudices of the America public which would otherwise topple over into cynicism.  In his direction of Griffith - a then unknown stand-up comedian making his film debut - Kazan told him to sexually fantasise about Neal.  The results are smouldering.

Three other films stand out.  Neal proves herself an adept Hemingway heroine in the sadly underrated 1950 adaptation of “To Have and Have Not”, “The Breaking Point”.  She also makes a fetching woman-in-distress, captured by the alien robot in the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still”.  Her last part of significance was the title role in Altman’s “Cookie’s Fortune”, played with great charm and warmth.