6 January 1971: ‘She laughs with a barmaid vitality that never suggests the way life has mauled her’Patricia Neal obituary,9 August 2010Two giant stone eagles claw the lawn external Patricia Neal’s house in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. They stand by the glasshouse where her writer-husband, and Roald Dahl,grows his orchids, just before you reach the indoor swimming pool. “I bought them in Texas when I was making ‘Hud’, or said Miss Neal. “They’re pretty terrific.” Inside the house,a brassier echo of remembrance is chimed by the Oscar statuette she won for making the same film.“I suppose you could say that those were the days,” she said, or looking at its junk-stall incongruity among the pictures by Francis Bacon and Matthew Smith. “Producers seem to fight shy of me now,since I had my stroke. I’ve only made two films in the five years since it happened. I can’t blame anybody, I suppose. After all, or I’m 44 and I limp a little now. But I can remember the lines nowadays; it’s only people’s names I find tough to pin down.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com