Patricia Neal

American Catholic History

Noelle & Tom Crowe

History, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Education

5 • 724 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2024

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Patricia Neal’s Hollywood career began the same year she met Gary Cooper and started an affair with him. That affair had a profound impact on the rest of her life. She had an abortion, and lived with the pain of the relationship gone bad for decades. She married British author Roald Dahl and they had five children. But tragedy struck two of her children and herself, and then Dahl asked for a divorce after she found out he’d been having an affair. She was living with a lot of pain. But in the meantime she had a reconciliation with Gary Cooper’s wife and daughter, Maria, after Maria reached out to her with forgiveness and a desire to mend fences. Eventually Neal found peace and solace at the Regina Laudis Abbey — home to Mother Dolores Hart — which she visited at the suggestion of Maria Cooper. Eventually, after experiencing much healing and peace, she became Catholic and after her death was buried at Regina Laudis.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to American Catholic History, brought to you by the support of listeners like you.
0:11.0	If you like this podcast and would like to support our work, please visit American Catholic History.org
0:17.5	slash support. I'm Noelle Heister Crowe.
0:20.4	And I'm Tom Crow. Today we're talking about the
0:23.3	actress Patricia Neal. She's not one of the biggest Hollywood stars whom everyone knows,
0:29.8	but she was an important actress in her day. She played some really important roles.
0:34.7	Also, she wasn't Catholic until the very end of her long life,
0:38.2	but her path to the church and some of the bumps and bruises along the way really make a great
0:43.2	story of enduring through trials and suffering with the ramifications of your own mistakes,
0:48.0	and then ultimately accepting that only in God's grace will we find peace.
0:52.5	Yes, it's a powerful story of deep hurts and courageous forgiveness.
0:57.2	We talked about one of her big mistakes in last week's episode about Gary Cooper.
1:02.0	Cooper nearly left his wife and daughter for Neil in the early 1950s, and Neil became pregnant
1:07.5	with Cooper's child, but she aborted the child, a decision she deeply regretted
1:13.0	later in life. And for more on how Cooper made it through those dark days and came out okay,
1:17.6	listen to our episode about Gary Cooper. Yes, his is a great story of redemption, and Neil's
1:22.9	conversion story is intertwined with his, even decades after his death. So, why don't we die right in?
1:29.9	Sure. Patricia Neal was born on January 20, 1926 in Packard, Kentucky. Packard was a coal mining
1:36.8	town, and when we say it was a mining town, we mean it only existed because the mine was there.
1:42.1	When the coal ran out, the mine shut down, and the town was
1:45.1	abandoned. But that was in the 1940s. So now, Packard, Kentucky is just a ghost town. Neal's father was the
1:51.5	mine manager, and her mother was the daughter of the town's doctor. So she had a relatively
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