American actress who was a Broadway success from her stage debut in 1945. Throughout the 1950’s she had many poor roles, but she received the Oscar for “Hud,” in 1963. In 1968 she won her second Oscar for “The Subject Was Roses.”
Raised in the coalfields of Packard, Kentucky, the headstrong girl wrote to Santa at ten that she wanted to be an actress. Her mom and dad, a coal company manager, supported her talent for doing monologues but urged her to go to college. She complied, attending Northwestern University. After two years, Neal headed for New York where she landed a role as understudy in a road company of “The Voice of the Turtle.”
Within a year she played the lead in “Another Part of the Forest,” winning a Tony in 1947. She moved on to Hollywood. She tells in her autobiography, published in 1988, of her affair with her leading man, the married Gary Cooper and discloses the fact that she aborted his child in 1950. She wept and wept over that loss. The affair continued for another two years and when she finally called a halt, she suffered a nervous breakdown.
After recovery, while starring in Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour,” Neal met a 6’6″ Welsh writer at a dinner party, Ronald Dahl. Wanting a family, she married Dahl in 1953 and settled in New York. They had three kids, Olivia, Tessa and Theo. One day in 1960, Theo’s nanny was wheeling his carriage across a Manhattan street when the pram was hit by a taxi. The child survived with eight operations to reduce his brain swelling. The following year the family moved to the tranquil town of Great Mussenden, England. A year later, seven-year-old Olivia, the eldest, contracted measles. Less than a week later, she developed measles encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain and she fell into a coma and died on 17 November 1962.
Neal gave birth to Ophelia the next year. She was pregnant with Lucy when she had a series of strokes in 1965. When Lucy was born by C-section, Dahl instructed the doctor to do a tubal ligation to prevent any more pregnancies.
Neal required years of rehabilitation for her to learn to walk and talk once again. She felt isolated from her children, not able to speak or reach out to them, and Dahl took over like a drill sergeant running things. It was a long, tough period before she was well enough to mother her kids and return to film in “The Subject was Roses,” 1968.
In 1972 she began a friendship with fashion coordinator Felicity Crossland; it was two years before she discovered that Crossland and her husband had become lovers. Dahl promised to end the affair and the marriage lasted another five years, until their daughter Ophelia told her mother that Dahl was still seeing Crossland. She and Dahl divorced on 5 July 1983.
Lonely and depressed, she found solace in Catholicism and she began going on retreats. One day, at the suggestion of the abbess, Neal began typing her memoirs in a little room overlooking the sheep meadow.
Neal was a fighter, a woman known as much for her spirit and for the acting triumphs and awards. Suffering from lung cancer, she died at age 84 at her home in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts on 8 August 2010.
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