Patricia Neal, Tony- and Oscar-winning actress, dies at 84

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Actress Patricia Neal, who won an Oscar for her turn in ‘Hud’ with Paul Newman, died Sunday at home in Edgartown, Mass.

Neal, who was famously involved with a married Gary Cooper, and married to and divorced from writer Roald Dahl, succumbed to lung cancer. She’d also dealt for decades with the effects of three strokes that hit her in 1965.

Her career started in New York theater in the 1940s, when she won a handful of awards, including a Tony, for her turn in Lillian Hellman‘s ‘Another Part of the Forest.’ She signed with Warner Bros. and moved to Hollywood, but the hot period of her film career lasted only a few years. Two of her nine films at that time were with Cooper, of whom Neal wrote in her 1988 autobiography, ‘He is one of the most beautiful things that ever happened to me in my life. I love him even now.’

Neal also made one film with a pre-presidential Ronald Reagan, in 1949. ‘He was a pleasant fellow,’ she said later. ‘We had adjoining suites and dined together each evening, but he never made a pass at me, dash it all.’

For more on Neal’s life, including her 1952 marriage to Dahl, the tragedies that struck two of her five children with him, and her journey back to acting after her strokes, read The Times’ full obituary.

-- Christie D’Zurilla

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