Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, whose life was marred by both success and tragedy, has died at the age of 84 of cancer, according to media reports. Neal won an Academy Award for her role in the 1963 film Hud alongside Paul Newman and boasted a long list of stage, film and TV credits over decades. She once had an affair with actor Gary Cooper with whom she starred in The Fountainhead and Bright Leaf but it ended in disaster after his wife found out. She was married to the British writer Roald Dahl for 30 years with whom she had five children. Their son suffered severe injuries after being hit by a taxi when he just four months old and their oldest child, daughter Olivia, died from the measles. R.I.P. Patricia Neal (1926-2010). Many years later, Neal’s marriage to Dahl ended after 30 years in 1983 after the writer had an affair with one of her friends and she moved from England to the United States where she split her time between New York and Martha’s Vineyard. When Neal was pregnant with their fifth child in 1965 she suffered three massive strokes and was in a coma for three weeks, but eventually recovered. “I think I was born stubborn, that’s all,” Neal said in a biography on the website of the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center that was dedicated in her honor in 1978 by the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. Among her memorable performances are those in in 1950’s A Face in the Crowd , 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still , and 1960’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. More recently, she appeared with Glenn Close in Cookie’s Fortune in 1999 and was featured in Lifetime’s movie Flying By with Billy Ray Cyrus in 2009.
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Patricia Neal Passes Away at 84
