Patricia Neal

American actress who was a Broadway success from her stage debut in 1945. Throughout the 1950's she had many poor roles, but she received the Oscar for "Hud," in 1963. In 1968 she won her second Oscar for "The Subject Was Roses."

Raised in the coalfields of Packard, Kentucky, the headstrong girl wrote to Santa at ten that she wanted to be an actress. Her mom and dad, a coal company manager, supported her talent for doing monologues but urged her to go to college. She complied, attending Northwestern University. After two years, Neal headed for New York where she landed a role as understudy in a road company of "The Voice of the Turtle."

Within a year she played the lead in "Another Part of the Forest," winning a Tony in 1947. She moved on to Hollywood. She tells in her autobiography, published in 1988, of her affair with her leading man, the married Gary Cooper and discloses the fact that she aborted his child in 1950. She wept and wept over that loss. The affair continued for another two years and when she finally called a halt, she suffered a nervous breakdown.

After recovery, while starring in Hellman's "The Children's Hour," Neal met a 6'6" Welsh writer at a dinner party, Ronald Dahl. Wanting a family, she married Dahl in 1953 and settled in New York. They had three kids, Olivia, Tessa and Theo. One day in 1960, Theo's nanny was wheeling his carriage across a Manhattan street when the pram was hit by a taxi. The child survived with eight operations to reduce his brain swelling. The following year the family moved to the tranquil town of Great Mussenden, England. A year later, seven-year-old Olivia, the eldest, contracted measles. Less than a week later, she developed measles encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain and she fell into a coma and died on 17 November 1962.

Neal gave birth to Ophelia the next year. She was pregnant with Lucy when she had a series of strokes in 1965.