Patricia Neal Was a ‘Very Strong-Willed Woman’ After Surviving Multiple Strokes and Coma

Though she was a revered Tony and Oscar winner who shared the screen with legends including John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Tyrone Power, Patricia Neal never outgrew the simpler pleasures of a quiet night at home. “We’d watch movies over at her house, and we’d laugh, and we’d cry, and we’d talk about films,” Stephen Michael Shearer, author of Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life, tells Closer of the intimate moments he shared with his friend and muse, who’d often invite him to her New York apartment or home in Martha’s Vineyard.

“Pat was a lovely, approachable woman. Anybody who knew her knew that by the end of a conversation, she would know more about you than you knew about her,” Shearer adds of Neal, who died in 2010 at the age of 84, having lived a life full of both thrilling successes and heartbreaking tragedies.

Born in a coal-mining town in Kentucky and raised in Tennessee, Neal first earned acclaim on Broadway before setting her sights on Hollywood. At 23, she landed a coveted role in 1949’s The Fountainhead opposite Gary Cooper, with whom she had a three-year affair. “Pat told me an awful lot about Gary Cooper, none of which I could publish, but she told me that indeed he was the most beautiful man she had ever met,” Shearer reveals.

By 1953, Neal had wed British author Roald Dahl, and the couple had five children. Her life proved challenging, however, both before and after she was named Best Actress for her role in 1963’s Hud. Her son Theo, at 4 months old, suffered brain damage after a 1960 New York traffic incident, and eldest child Olivia was just 7 when she died in 1962 from measles encephalitis. Then, while pregnant in 1965, Neal suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes, leaving her in a coma for three weeks.

Patricia Neal Had a Will to Live and Love

“Variety even published that Patricia Neal had died,” Shearer shares of the scary time during which the actress had to learn how to walk and talk again. “She even admitted that when she came out of the coma, she didn’t know who her children were.” Still, Neal — who divorced Dahl in 1983 — fought to get her health and career back, often championing those going through battles of their own.

Shearer recalls witnessing her kindness at a 2000 Martha’s Vineyard charity event for children with learning disabilities. “Patricia was communicating with them, touching them, holding them, talking with them and laughing with them,” he says. “They didn’t know who she was. They just knew she was a nice lady. She really got [involved] with those children and let them know that they were loved.”

Her indefatigable and compassionate spirit, in turn, made her easy to love. “I miss her presence. I miss the fact that she was a very strong-willed woman, but very vulnerable at the same time,” Shearer says. “Every time I talk to somebody and they want to know what Patricia Neal was like, I tell them she was just like you and me — a very, very real person.”