01/21/2026
We hope amid all of yesterday's Dolly hubbub that this other show-biz diva isn’t forgotten: A Happy Historic Birthday to Patricia Neal (1926 - 2010)!
The most successful movie actress in Knoxville history was born 100 years ago in tiny and now nonexistent Packard, Ky., but moved to Knoxville as the preschool daughter of a middle-management coal executive. Here she spent most of her youth, and began her very successful career as an actress. As a child she practiced on the front-porch stage of the family home on East Knoxville’s Parkview Avenue, and under the tutelage of Emily Mahan, who ran a performing studio at 1832 West Cumberland, “Patsy Neal” was still an elementary-school kid when she was became a familiar face in public recitals. As a popular student at Knoxville High School, she began performing with the respected professional Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. Her first big role was as Melanie in their production of a current Broadway drama Thunder Rock. After it's debut in Abingdon in the summer of 1942, when Patsy was 16, Knoxville promoter Malcolm Miller was so impressed that he arranged for the show to make an unusual road appearance at Knoxville High School on Fifth Avenue on July 24, 1942. She left Knoxville to attend Northwestern, and by 1946 she was on Broadway, earning a Tony award for her role in the Lillian Hellman play, Another Part of the Forest. She was soon in Hollywood, with roles opposite Ronald Reagan, John Garfield, and Gary Cooper, especially in a notable early movie, The Fountainhead. In years to come, she portrayed a wide range of roles from worried mothers to femmes fatale, winning an Oscar for Hud in 1963. She was for 30 years married to Welsh author Roald Dahl, with whom she had several children. After suffering crippling cerebral aneurisms at age 39, she recovered to return to the stage, and another Oscar nomination for The Subject was Roses. She spent most of her adult life away but helped establish the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Fort Sanders, and returned to visit friends in Knoxville, especially her lifelong mentor, Emily Mahan, so often that she was reserved a room at what’s now the Oliver Hotel.
