Trivia of Patricia Neal

 Trivia of Patricia Neal (20 January 1926 - 8 August 2010)

*Neal grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she attended Knoxville High School, and studied drama at Northwestern, where she was a member of Pi Beta Phi sorority. At Northwestern, she was crowned Syllabus Queen in a campus-wide beauty pageant.

*Made her film debut with Ronald Reagan in John Loves Mary (1949).The casting of Patricia Neal was something of an upset at the time.In order to provide its new contract player with the screen credit "and introducing Patricia Neal," the opening titles awkwardly read "Warner Bros. presents 'John Loves Mary' starring Ronald Reagan and Jack Carson."

*During the filming of The Fountainhead (1949), Neal began an affair with her married co-star Gary Cooper, whom she had met in 1947 when she was 21 and he was 46. At one point in their relationship, Cooper persuade Neal to abort their unborn baby. Neal acquiesced to his demands and later expressed overwhelming regret at not giving birth. She became an anti-abortion activist in later years. Cooper punched Neal in the face after he saw Kirk Douglas attempt to seduce her, the only time he is known to have hit a woman.

*Patricia Neal admitted did not get along with her Operation Pacific (1951) co star, John Wayne.John Wayne was dissatisfied with the finished film, believing it to be overlong and containing too much romance. He was also opposed from the beginning to the casting of Patricia Neal, whom he felt was too young at 24 for the role of his ex-wife.However, they worked together again on In Harm's Way (1965) where she noted that he had mellowed a lot, possibly because he was seriously ill with lung cancer at the time.

*Neal's appearance is in the movie Hud (1963) just only 21 minutes and 51 seconds, making her performance both the shortest to win a Best Actress Oscar and the shortest to win in a leading category.

*On December 1960, her son Theo, four months old, suffered brain damage when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. In May 1961, the family returned to Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where Theo continued his rehabilitation. Neal described the two years of family life during Theo's recovery as one of the most beautiful periods of her life. However, on November 17, 1962, their daughter Olivia died at age 7 from measles encephalitis.The story of Olivia's death and how Neal and her husband Raol Dahl coped with the tragedy was dramatized in 2020 as a made-for-TV movie, To Olivia.

*On February 5, 1965, while on location filming 7 Women (1965), a pregnant Patricia was bathing daughter Tessa Dahl at a rented home when she suffered a massive, paralyzing stroke, followed by two more. Baby Lucy Dahl was later born healthy but in its aftermath, the actress suffered from partial paralysis, partial blindness, she lost her memory and was unable to speak."Variety", the entertainment newspaper, mistakenly reported in their February 22, 1965 headline that Patricia Neal had died from her multiple strokes five days earlier. In truth, she remained in a coma for 21 days.