Tony Earnshaw: Patricia Neal – a real star and a woman of rare courage

It was the great misfortune of Patricia Neal to suffer three debilitating strokes during 1965 while she was pregnant. She was 39. She had to drop out of Seven Women, a drama that would end up being John Ford's last completed film. More crucially, with the support of her husband, Roald Dahl, she had to learn to walk and talk again.

As for the career, it foundered. Neal did make a triumphant return to movies and was Oscar-nominated for her role as a wife caught in a disintegrating marriage in The Subject was Roses. But for all intents and purposes, she was finished as a film star.

Hers was an awfully big adventure. She was born Patsy Lou Neal, in Tennessee, in 1926. She made her film debut at 23, in 1949, and by the time she made The Fountainhead later the same year, she was entangled in a romance with her 47-year-old co-star, Gary Cooper.

It must have been a heady time. The affair with Cooper lasted three years, during which she became pregnant with his child. Her decision to have an abortion coincided with a nervous breakdown – the first in a series of tragedies that struck over the course of the next decade.

Neal was ripe for stardom in the 1950s. She was possessed of a husky southern drawl and a look that combined warmth, toughness and femininity. Her cool sexuality balanced the macho appeal of some big-name leading man. As well as Cooper, they included Ronald Reagan (twice), John Wayne, Richard Todd, John Garfield, Van Heflin, Van Johnson, Tyrone Power, Victor Mature and Yorkshire-born Michael Rennie.

It was with Rennie, in the landmark sci-fi drama, The Day the Earth Stood Still, that Neal enjoyed arguably her biggest success of the 1950s. As the ordinary mother who unmasks a benevolent visitor from the stars, Neal becomes the saviour of the human race when she speaks the alien words "Klaatu barada nikto" to a giant robot and saves the earth from destruction.

She married Roald Dahl in 1953 and gave him five children between 1955 and 1965. Motherhood prevented her consolidating her position in films but she returned in the 1960s in two key movies – Breakfast at Tiffany's and Hud.

In the former, she was a rival to Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly. In the latter, she partnered Paul Newman's noxious cowboy as a plain yet sensual middle-aged housekeeper and, in 1964, won the Academy Award as best actress. It was her finest hour.

Illness and a protracted period of recuperation prevented Patricia Neal from taking her rightful place among Hollywood's female elite. She ranks alongside any of the stars who emerged during that period – Elizabeth Taylor, Anne Bancroft, Lauren Bacall et al.

"I've had a lovely time," she said last Saturday, the day before her death.

Knowing what she suffered in her life, it takes a woman of rare courage to say that.

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