“Baby, I guess I was just born gutsy,” Patricia Neal says, waving aside offers for help. Dressed in a green pantsuit and tennis shoes and tightly gripping her mahogany cane, she makes her way unassisted to a nearby chair.
Neal, 73, began her acting career more than 50 years ago at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va., and she isn’t finished yet. She has the role of Jewel Mae “Cookie” Orcutt in Robert Altman’s critically praised “Cookie’s Fortune,” about a strange family in Holly Springs, Miss. The cast includes Glenn Close and Julianne Moore as her nieces and Liv Tyler as her grand-niece.
“I didn’t make a fortune from it,” Neal says, “but it’s good fortune to get it. And, of course, I’m back in moving pictures. You know, it’s my first film in 10 years. . . . People just don’t think about me.”
She made her Broadway debut in “The Voice of the Turtle” in 1946 and won a Tony Award for Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest.” That led to her 1949 movie debut opposite Ronald Reagan in “John Loves Mary.”
Her famous love affair with Gary Cooper began when she co-starred with him in “The Fountainhead.” It nearly broke up his marriage. “I couldn’t resist him,” she says. “I took one look at him, and I thought he was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. Of course, I ended near suicide over the whole thing.”
She married writer Roald Dahl in 1953 and settled in England, where one tragedy after another followed. Her son, Theo, was injured as a baby and survived eight brain operations. Her daughter, Olivia, died of measles in 1962.
After a series of roles, including “A Face in the Crowd” (1957) and the classic “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), she won an Academy Award for the role of Alma, the earthy housekeeper opposite Paul Newman, in “Hud” (1963). It was followed by “In Harm’s Way” with John Wayne. She received another Oscar nomination for “The Subject Was Roses.”
In 1965, at 39, she was giving her baby, Tessa, a bath when she had a stroke. The ambulance couldn’t find her house. She had three successive strokes that left her semiparalyzed; her speech and movement were affected. On top of this, she was three months’ pregnant with her daughter Lucy, who was born healthy.
“I could be bitter about it all, but what’s the purpose? You get on with what you’re dealt. There were times I would have given up if I hadn’t remembered something my father once said. `Be a thoroughbred. When you call upon a thoroughbred, he gives you all the strength, blood and sinew in him. When you call upon a jackass, he kicks.’ “
She and Dahl were bitterly divorced but later became friends again. He died in 1990. Her life was dramatized on television, with Glenda Jackson as Neal.
“I didn’t know who she was,” Neal admits, “but when I saw the film, I was thrilled with her performance. She played me better than I did in real life.”
Altman cast her in “Cookie’s Fortune” after her daughter Lucy reminded him that she still wants to work.
“I love to work, and I wouldn’t charge producers $10 million like these girls do today. Hell, I’d work for a lot less than a million — a real bargain.”
