Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal dead at 84

Actress Patricia Neal, who rebuilt a troubled career to win an Academy Award for her role in the 1963 film Hud, only to face a more desperate battle for survival when three strokes left her paralyzed and unable to speak or remember, has died. She was 84.

Neal died Sunday of lung cancer at her home in Edgartown, Massachusetts, her family told the Associated Press.

A succession of tragedies marked the life of the actress whose bright promise on Broadway in the mid-1940s took her to Hollywood and into a succession of lackluster films, as well as a desperate love affair with actor Gary Cooper and marriage to British writer Roald Dahl.

Her infant son's brain was damaged when his stroller was struck by a New York City taxicab, a daughter died as a result of measles and then -- only a year after she finally won critical acclaim and an Oscar for her portrayal of the weary housekeeper in Hud -- she suffered three strokes that appeared to end her career.

With the determined help of her husband, Neal recovered sufficiently to return to films, but then lost Dahl to another woman whom she had accepted as a friend.

"I am bitter, yes," she told an interviewer in 1984, the year after she divorced Dahl. "But I keep remembering that Roald and I had some good times together -- and he did so much for me after my strokes.... It was a terrible blow when I found out."

She was born Patsy Louise Neal on January 20, 1926 in a Packard, Kentucky mining camp, where her father was transportation manager for a coal company. In Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family moved while she was in grammar school, she was precocious and showed talent in reciting monologues at church gatherings.

A complete list of survivors was not available.