[originally published January 20, 2025]
Today is the birthday of the great American actress Patricia Neal (1926–2010).
She’s marvelous in many films, including, to be sure, Hud (1963), for which she won an Academy Award.
She was also, gloriously tough as nails, the original Olivia Walton in the 1971 TV film The Homecoming.
I also particularly appreciate her delivery, in The Breaking Point (1950), of “I guess I should have swam back to port—or is it ‘swum’?”
In The Subject Was Roses (1968), she gives one of the greatest performances ever committed to film, and her soliloquy at the finale—a five-page speech she struggled to memorize, only a few years after she’d endured a series of devastating strokes, and performed in a single, stunning take—is, or at least should be, the stuff of legend.
She spoke at my graduation from Northwestern University in 1979, and I note that she was considerably younger then than I am now.
Afterward, outside the auditorium, I told her how much I admired her work, adding that I’d been devoted to The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) since I’d first seen it years before on The 4:30 Movie. (Or maybe it was Million Dollar Movie?)
“Oh yes,” she said (as I’m sure she’d said hundreds of times already to other beaming fans). “The film in which I said ‘Klaatu barada nikto.’”
To my very face she said that.
Just imagine.
I'd put that up against a scolding my brother and I got from my mum when I was about ten years old. We skulked home (in parallel with our playmates next door) after an adult neighbor busted us in an act of vandalism and reported to our parents.
We listened for an hour as our friends parents next door shouted their lungs out (this was at a cottage - screened windows and no A/C). A few minutes after they ran out of steam, my mum sat us on the sofa [ok that's a topic with this crew] and said these words:
"Everyone. When they're about your age. Does something this dumb. Once. This was yours."
No other punishment.
Made an impression. I was out of the vandalism business for good.
i like this so much. and you met her! for me it was her "Washington Story," with Van Johnson, in which she portrays "a green reporter in search of government corruption who instead falls for a congressman."