Patricia Neal: Great Career, Tragic Life (January 20, 1926 – August 8, 2010)

Patricia Neal, a Kentucky coal miner's daughter, was not only a first-rate actress who's been called the American Jeanne Moreau—she also lived a life so dramatic in its own right that it was the subject of a 1981 TV movie, The Patricia Neal Story. 

During the filming of the screen adaptation of Ayn Rand's controversial classic, The Fountainhead, the 21-year-old actress began an affair with Gary Cooper, then 46. It ended after Cooper's wife sent Neal a telegram requesting its termination, and also after Cooper's daughter spat at Neal in public. 

In 1953, Neal married British writer Roald Dahl, whom she'd met two years earlier at a dinner party thrown by Lillian Hellman. According to Wikipedia, 

In the early 1960s the couple suffered through grievous injury to one child and the death of another. On December 5, 1960, their son Theo, four months old, suffered brain damage when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. On November 17, 1962, their daughter, Olivia, died at age 7 from measles encephalitis.    

While pregnant in 1965, Neal suffered three-burst cerebral aneurysms, and was in a coma for three weeks. Dahl directed her rehabilitation and she subsequently relearned to walk and talk ("I think I'm just stubborn, that's all").

On film, Neal commands your total attention in every scene she's in, whether she's sharing the screen with Paul Newman (Hud, for which she won the Oscar), Gary Cooper, or even an alien robot (The Day the Earth Stood Still).

Recommended viewing:

• 1949 - The Fountainhead 
• 1951 - The Day the Earth Stood Still 
• 1957 - A Face in the Crowd 
• 1957 - Breakfast at Tiffany's 
• 1963 - Hud 
• 2003 - Broadway: The Golden Age

Neal's obituary in The New York Times

Poll: Who Did You Miss in the Oscars "Memoriam"?

Fur is flying over Farrah Fawcett's snub, as well as Bea Arthur's—"Mame," anyone? I mean, if the gay production staffers who lobbied to get Gerard Butler and Bradley Cooper onto the same stage (and thank you boys, whoever you are) can't remember Bea Arthur in "Mame," then what's Hollywood coming to? 

I especially wish I'd seen the winsome Blossom Dearie, who made beautiful music for films and TV for over 50 years, including the jazzy "Figure 8" and "Unpack Your Adjectives" for Saturday Morning's Schoolhouse Rock. But hey, you win some, you lose some (sorry, I couldn't resist). 

It's no coincidence that all three ladies made their mark in TV more than film, and although "Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" includes television,  and the Academy broadcasts its awards show on television, AMPAS has always been biased against the upstart medium.

And FYI: Carl Malden's mug was shown last and longest only because he was a bigshot Academy bigwig. Malden's hyper-real, Method-influenced work was amazing in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and scores of other films, especially in sensitive portrayals of working-class men, but his most famous act in recent years was campaigning for his buddy Elia Kazan to get a Lifetime Achievement Award, even though many Academy members objected on grounds that the information Kazan had supplied to Senator McCarthy in the 1950s helped ruin the careers of many an artist, not to mention the fact (OK, I will mention it) that he'd already won several Oscars for his achievements!

Among the artists whose careers were damaged by Hollywood informants were Zero Mostel, Disney animator Art Babbitt (who made mushrooms dance in "Fantasia"), and the great Judy Holliday (who took home an Oscar for her first starring role as a ditzy blonde in "Born Yesterday" but actually posessed a genius-level IQ. You can read more about Judy Holliday at my other blog, Pansy Craze). Holliday's story is especially tragic, considering that shortly after the Blacklist was lifted, she died of breast cancer.

But hey, if McCarthyism hadn't hit Hollywood so hard, Arthur Miller might not have written "The Crucible," and maybe that made it OK to Malden and others at the end of the day.

In Hollywood, only two things are political—awards, and death.

OK, enough with the rants already, who did you miss in the Oscars Memoriam? Tell me in your comments below. (Or, alternatively, what would have been a more appropriate song and singer to accompany the montage?)