She is well known for, among other roles, playing World War II widow Helen Benson in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), radio journalist Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd (1957), wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and the worn-out housekeeper Alma Brown in Hud (1963) (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress).

[4] Neal gained her first job in New York as an understudy in the Broadway production of the John Van Druten play The Voice of the Turtle.

She suffered a nervous breakdown around this time, following the end of her relationship with Cooper, and left Hollywood for New York, returning to Broadway in 1952 for a revival of The Children's Hour.

During the same period, she appeared on television in an episode of The Play of the Week (1960), featuring an Actors Studio-dominated cast in a double bill of plays by August Strindberg,[5] and in a British production of Clifford Odets' Clash by Night (1959), which co-starred one of the first generation of Actors Studio members, Nehemiah Persoff.

Neal was re-united with John Wayne in Otto Preminger's In Harm's Way (1965), winning her second BAFTA Award.

Neal played a dying widowed mother trying to find a home for her three children in an episode of NBC's Little House on the Prairie broadcast in 1975.

Neal appeared in a series of television commercials in the 1970s and 1980s, notably for pain relief medicine Anacin and Maxim instant coffee.

In April 2009, Neal received a lifetime achievement award from WorldFest Houston on the occasion of the debut of her film, Flying By.

[9] She was a subject of the British television show This Is Your Life in 1978 when she was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at a cocktail party on London's Park Lane.

[citation needed] In 1948, either during filming or after finishing work on The Fountainhead (1949), Neal began an affair with her married co-star Gary Cooper, whom she had met in 1947 when she was 21 and he was 46.

[1] On December 5, 1960, their son Theo, four months old, suffered brain damage when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City.

Variety magazine ran an obituary, but she survived with the assistance of Dahl and a number of volunteers who developed a gruelling style of therapy which fundamentally changed the way that stroke patients were treated.

[25] This period of their lives was dramatised in the television film The Patricia Neal Story (1981), in which the couple was played by Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde.

[30] She had become a Catholic four months before she died[31] and was buried in the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where the actress Dolores Hart, her friend since the early 1960s, had become a nun and ultimately prioress.