Patricia Neal:PERHAPS THE most famous line spoken on screen by the actor Patricia Neal, who has died of lung cancer aged 84, was "Klaatu barada nikto!" in Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
These incomprehensible words, uttered to a robot that carries her into a spaceship, save the world from destruction.
Neal won her Oscar for a more down-to-earth performance, as the cynical, world-weary housekeeper Alma Brown in Martin Ritt's contemporary western Hud(1963). Perhaps the most telling indication of Neal's gifts was the fact that, although the role was quite a brief one, the academy included her in the category of best actress rather than best supporting actress. One memorable moment in the film was improvised: in response to Paul Newman's kiss, Neal swats a fly, which she happened to notice on the set.
Neal, born Patsy Lou Neal in Kentucky, had a sexy, husky southern nasal drawl. With her dark hair dyed bright-blonde, she began her film career inauspiciously with John Loves Mary(1949), in which she played a senator's daughter engaged to ex-GI Ronald Reagan.
In the same year, with a Warner Bros contract, her special qualities were better used in King Vidor's baroque film of the Ayn Rand bestseller The Fountainhead.
As the architecture critic Dominique Francon, she first appears at the edge of a quarry, watching, in an erotic manner, a bare-chested Gary Cooper phallically using a pneumatic drill.
The sexual chemistry in the film reflected Neal and the married Cooper’s real-life romantic entanglement.
On Broadway in 1952, in a revival of Hellman's The Children's Hour,she made an impression as a schoolteacher accused of lesbianism. During rehearsals, she met the writer Roald Dahl at a party given by Hellman.
They married in 1953 and settled in England, where they brought up five children.
In 1958, Neal appeared with great success in Tennessee Williams's one-act play Suddenly, Last Summerat the Arts Theatre in London. She was heartbroken to lose out to Elizabeth Taylor when a film of the play was made.
Following Hud, she filmed for three days on the set of John Ford's Seven Women(1966), before having a stroke. She was replaced in the film by Anne Bancroft.
After suffering further strokes, Neal became partially paralysed and incapable of articulate speech, but she learned to walk and talk again. She worked with brain-damaged children and was awarded the American Heart Association’s heart of the year award by President Lyndon Johnson.
Several years later she founded the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Centre in Knoxville, Tennessee, for stroke, spinal cord and brain injury patients.
Her remarkable recovery allowed her to return to the cinema. As the embittered wife in The Subject Was Roses(1968), she was again nominated for an Oscar.
She and Dahl divorced after his affair with Felicity Crosland, whom he married in 1983, and Neal returned to live in the US.
Her life was recounted in a 1981 TV film starring Glenda Jackson, with Dirk Bogarde as Dahl. In her autobiography, As I Am(1988), Neal, who had found comfort in Catholicism, wrote: "A strong positive mental attitude will create more miracles than any wonder drug."
Her children Tessa, Ophelia, Theo and Lucy; her brother Pete and sister Margaret; and 10 grandchildren and step-grandchildren, survive her.
Patricia (Patsy Lou) Neal, born January 20th, 1926; died August 8th, 2010.