Patricia Neal, 84: Oscar-winning actress overcame physical, emotional adversity

"She faced her final illness as she had all of the many trials she endured: with indomitable grace, good humor and a great deal of her self-described stubbornness," her family said in a statement.

Four decades ago, at the height of Neal's stage and film career, a seemingly insurmountable series of crises struck her family. In the span of five years, an infant son was severely injured, a young daughter died, and Neal herself suffered three massive strokes. She recovered and became as well-known and heralded for her stalwart, even heroic, ability to face physical and emotional adversity as for her seemingly boundless acting talent.

"G-O-D planned it," Neal said of her personal tragedies during a 1999 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution when she was honored by the Atlanta chapter of Women in Film. "Early in my life, a lot of horrible things happened," she said. "But you get stronger and stronger. Some things sure make me cry. But it's over in time. Everything comes to an end."

Her knack for performing had led her to Broadway at age 20. Starring in Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest" in 1946, she was among the first ever crop of Tony winners (her award: an engraved compact). It led to memorable films such as the '50s sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and 1961's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," with Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. And it led to television, where she starred in 1971's "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story," the forerunner of CBS' "The Waltons."

Neal's calling card was her hypnotic voice — a sexy, gritty, lower-register hum marinated in cigarette smoke and vodka. Though well-off and living the good life in England during the heyday of her film performances, she liked to play up her "Tennessee hillbilly" roots and flashed a brash attitude. After filming 1949's "The Fountainhead," she scandalized Hollywood and movie fans with a long, torrid affair with married co-star Gary Cooper and, as she revealed in her 1988 autobiography, "As I Am," had an illegal, back-room abortion.

In 1953, Neal wed the eccentric English writer Roald Dahl ("Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"). They divorced three decades later after she discovered his own long-term affair.

Three weeks after she finished filming "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in December 1960, Neal and Dahl's infant son, Theo, suffered massive head injuries when his carriage was struck by a taxi in New York. Then in late 1962, her 7-year-old daughter Olivia died following a bout with measles.

"What does one do? How many body blows can one endure?" Neal wrote to a doctor at the time.

What followed sent a nerve-rattling jolt through the entertainment industry: Neal, pregnant with another child in early 1965, suffered three massive strokes brought on by a brain aneurysm.

She remained in a coma for 21 days. The strokes left her paralyzed on her right side, brought upon double-vision and rendered her speechless.

But three months later, following extensive physical and speech therapy, Neal walked on her own into a news conference and said in drawn-out words, "I ... feel ... fine." She also vowed that following the delivery of her baby, she'd be back at work in a year.

Her prediction was close enough. In 1968, Dahl insisted Neal accept an offer to star with the late Jack Albertson and a young Martin Sheen in the post-war drama "The Subject Was Roses." It earned her another best actress Oscar nomination.

She returned to Atlanta in March 2003 to appear during a Turner Classic Movies mini-fest of Oscar-winning female performances, held at the Rialto Center for the Performing Arts. Neal felt a strong connection to the Georgia capital.

Her older sister, Margaret Ann Vandenoord, whom she called NiNi, has lived in Dunwoody for years, and Neal often visited.

The actress also retreated to Atlanta when her affair with Cooper ended and she fell into a deep depression. The late Dr. Henry Stelling, her sister's physician, counseled her here for several months. She would later say, "He saved my life."

In movies, where she could channel her emotions, Neal is best known for "Hud," the rural, black-and-white Texas drama based on Larry McMurtry's novel, "Horseman Pass By." She played the no-nonsense housekeeper Alma, a character she said she knew "in my bones."

In the movie, Neal was a natural, not even thinking twice when using a dishtowel to swat an errant horsefly that chanced into one kitchen scene.

"I'm a good actress," Neal said. "That's about all I can tell you. I do not study it. I just do my best."

Patsy Louise Neal was born Jan. 20, 1926, at home in Packard, Ky., a coal-mining town of 300 wooden houses.

Neal's father, William Burdette "Coot" Neal, was manager for the Southern Coal and Coke Company. Her mother, Eura Midred Petrey, was a chiseled housewife.

The family moved to Knoxville when Neal was 3, and one month before her 11th birthday she watched her elementary teacher recite a monologue at a Methodist church. It hooked Neal on performing. Just before Christmas 1936, she scribbled a message and placed it in her fireplace stocking. It read: "Dear Santa, What I want for Christmas is to study dramatics."

Six years later he did just that at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va., and in her later teens at Northwestern University.

In 1945 she headed to New York, setting her sights on Broadway. After only a few months she had her first job at $150 a week — as understudy for both Martha Scott and Vicki Cummings in "The Voice of the Turtle." It was the play's producer, Alfred de Liagre, who suggested Neal alter her first name from Patsy to Patricia.

Then came "Another Part of the Forest," in which Neal played a younger Regina Hubbard, the feisty, witchy woman originated by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway in Hellman's "The Little Foxes" and, later, by Bette Davis on film.

Neal won the Tony for "Forest" and became a founding member of the Actor's Studio, joining the first advanced class with Marlon Brando.

She made film versions in 1949 of "John Loves Mary" and "The Hasty Heart," both with Ronald Reagan, and "The Fountainhead," with Cooper. She later made "Operation Pacific" (1951) and "In Harm's Way" (1965), both with John Wayne; Kazan's socially astute "A Face in the Crowd" (1957), with Andy Griffith; and the screen adaptation of Truman Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Her last full-length feature was as the title character in Robert Altman's kooky "Cookie's Fortune" (1999).

Even if she had never made "Hud" and won an Oscar, the low-budget 1951 alien film "The Day the Earth Stood Still" would have gained her screen immortality. With its weee-oooh music, alien spaceship and Neal enunciating the odd space lingo, "Klaatu barada nikto," "Day" became a sci-fi classic.

"When I made that film, I found it so hard to keep a straight face," Neal said. "I thought it was comic, comic, comic."

But she came to love and respect the movie.

Between films, she often returned to Broadway, co-starring with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in "The Miracle Worker." She also made her London debut in Tennessee Williams' "Suddenly Last Summer."

"I'm an actress from beginning to end," she once said. "And that's really what I am."

But she was more.

Following her long, hard recovery from physical disability, media attention on strokes skyrocketed. In 1978, the Patrica Neal Rehabilitation Center was dedicated at Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville.

The strokes impaired her, but she never doubted her gift for acting.

"I had never once during my illness believed the stroke had affected the talent," she wrote in her autobiography. "Memory and movement, yes, but my brain never stopped understanding how people think and feel."

Neal was always a bit miffed that she played the mother, not Helen Keller's teacher, on Broadway in "The Miracle Worker." Instead, she was challenged to work her own miracles.

In life.

- Bob Longino, for the AJC

Associated Press reports were used in this article.