Real life for the actress Patricia Neal was every bit as dramatic, tragic and inspiring as anything she played on stage or screen - early stardom, a Tony, separation, a nervous breakdown, marriage, children, an Oscar, the near death of one child, the death of another, a stroke, recovery, return to film and theatre, betrayal, divorce, and life again in America. Born Patsy Lou Neal in a mining town in Kentucky, she was raised in Tennessee. Inspired by a woman delivering monologues in her local Methodist Church, she studied drama at Northwestern University, Illinois. In 1946, three years after she arrived in New York and changed her name to Patricia, she won a Tony for her role as Regina in Lillian Hellman's sequel to Little Foxes. Hollywood beckoned. With her ravishingly sharp features and a husky southern drawl, she was hailed as a young Tallulah Bankhead and a promising Bette Davis. In filming Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1949) she fell in love with her much older, married co-star, Gary Cooper. He was, she later said, the love of her life. When he returned to his wife, she suffered a nervous breakdown.
In 1953, she married the handsome, brusque Anglo-Norwegian writer, Roald Dahl, with whom she was to have five children. In 1960, their only son suffered brain damage when his pram was hit by a New York taxi. Two years later her eldest child, Olivia, died from measles. She continued to act, notably playing "2-E", George Peppard's other woman and Audrey Hepburn's rival, in Breakfast At Tiffany's, which led to her 1963 Oscar-winning performance as housekeeper Alma in the contemporary western Hud, opposite Paul Newman.
In England in 1965 and pregnant with her fifth child, she suffered three strokes and emerged from a coma, paralysed, blind and mute. Thanks to a relentlessly punishing regime imposed by her husband, she recovered and, although she had to refuse the role of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, she was nominated for a second Oscar for The Subject Was Roses in 1968. Parts in film and television followed in the 1970s. In 1981, The Patricia Neal Story, starring Glenda Jackson, depicted some of her experiences.
In 1983, devastated to learn that her husband had been having an affair with one of her friends for a decade, she and Dahl divorced and she returned to America where she continued to act but also converted to Catholicism. She also continued to work with brain-damaged children and established a rehabilitation centre in Knoxville. Born on January 20, 1926, she is survived by four of her five children. Among her grandchildren is the model, Sophie Dahl. She died on August 8.
* The National