NEW YORK, (Reuters) – Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, whose life witnessed triumph in Hollywood movies and tragedy at home, has died in Massachusetts. She was 84.
The husky-voiced Neal won an Academy Award for her role in the 1963 film “Hud” alongside Paul Newman, and she boasted a long list of stage, film and TV credits alongside Holly-wood’s leading men including Ronald Reagan, John Wayne and Tyrone Power.
“She faced her final illness as she had all of the many trials she endured: with indo-mitable grace, good humor, and a great deal of her self-described stubbornness,” her family said in a statement.
The family said Neal died on Sunday morning at her home on Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts) surrounded by relatives. She had been suffering from lung cancer, according to media reports.
Neal once had a love 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, leaving Neal broken-hearted, according to an obituary in the LA Times. She was married to the British writer Roald Dahl for 30 years with whom she had five children.
Their son, however, suffered severe injuries after being hit by a taxi when he just four-months-old and their oldest child, daughter Olivia, died at the age of 7 from measles. When Neal was pregnant with their fifth child in 1965 she suffered three massive strokes and was in a coma for three weeks.
But with the help of her husband, she recovered and gave birth to a healthy daughter Lucy and returned to films, acting in “The Subject Was Roses.”
“I think I was born stubborn, that’s all,” Neal said in a biography on the website of the Patricia Neal Rehabilita-tion Center that was dedicated in her honor in 1978 by the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville, Tennessee.