Patricia Neals Passed Away on Sunday

EDGARTON (GaeaTimes.com) — Oscar Winning actress Patricia Neal has passed away on Sunday after a long struggle with lung cancer. Before her death she was paralyzed with three consecutive strokes, leaving her unable to move or speak.

A number of tragedies marked her life whose bright promise on Broadway in the mid-1940s took her to Hollywood and into a succession of lackluster films as well as desperate love affair with actor Gary Cooper and marriage to British writer Roald Dahl. Her infant son’s brain was severely damaged in a car mishap and later, her daughter died as a result of measles. Only a year after, when she received an Oscar award for her portrayal of the weary housekeeper in the 1963 film “Hud”, she suffered three strokes that appeared to end her carrier.
With the determined help of her husband, Neal recovered sufficiently to return to films, but then lost Dahl to another woman whom she had accepted as a friend.

Neal’s film career, however, did not deliver on the promise of her early stage success. Hollywood treated her like the typical starlet. According to Barry Farrell who wrote a biography on her life,

Hollywood misunderstood Pat completely. She was cast in heavy romantic roles, silly little comedies, sophisticated, lacquered-beauty roles everything that was wrong for her.

In her later years, Ms. Neal put her time and energy into raising money for brain injured children and adults. In dozens of speaking engagements, she demonstrated that a brain injury was not necessarily the end of life or of joy. In 1988 she said in an interview-

I can’t see from one eye, I’ve been paralyzed. I’ve fallen down and broken a hip. Stubbornness gets you through the bad times. You don’t give in.

May Patricia Neal finally Rests in Peace!