To all her roles, good and indifferent, Patricia Neal brings a sense of quiet excitement that speeds the circulation of contemplative men. This year, for playing Alma, the housekeeper in Hud, she has been nominated for an Oscar as the best actress of 1963. It is a really fine performance, credibly raw, with a sense of inviolable worth beneath the rough skin of her hands and the drawn exhaustion of her face. As in her earlier films, she coolly suggests prodigious experience with few scars. Her mahogany voice manages to create an air of sex without regret. Her steady eyes look through anything they see, and she creates the impression that no detonation could make her blink.
Fast Star. These days the good actresses leave Hollywood, and Pat Neal left long ago. At 38, she can afford to space out her pictures by long months at home on her pocket farm located in Buckinghamshire, England. "We have central heating," she says proudly, "and two cans." The house is surrounded by 200 rosebushes, all tended by a very tall gardener with thorn scratches on his hands and a look of perdurable tweed. This turns out to be Patricia Neal's husband, Roald Dahl, whose dry and shivery stories have been collected in volumes called Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss.
Whitefield Cottage, Great Missenden, Bucks, is an odd address for Patricia Neal to have settled into, for she was born in a mining camp in Packard, Ky., where her father was local transport manager for the South Coal & Coke Co. After two years at Northwestern, she naively headed for New York to become a star of Broadway plays—and became one in less than a year, winning a Tony award and the New York Drama Critics best-actress award for her performance in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest (1946).
Secret Life. Hollywood bid ("It always sounds glamorous when you're young"), and she responded. Soon she was making The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper. Those long deep looks at Cooper, still remembered viscerally by every man who saw the picture, were remembered most by Cooper himself, who for a time shed his marital responsibilities, ripped off his merit badges, and fell head-over-spurs in love, beginning one of those muted Olympian affairs that everyone knows about but few discuss.
"I was very much in love with him," she remembers. "But I got myself into a sticky mess which couldn't work, didn't work, and never should have worked. He was the most gorgeously attractive man. Bright, too. Although some people didn't think so. I lived this secret life for several years. I was so ashamed; yet there was the fact of it. I had made few close friends. All I had, there in Hollywood, was that one love. I'm sorry for any damage that was done—and I'm sure there was. You always think no one is going to get hurt, but someone always does—lots of people."