Roald Dahl & Patricia Neal

What Happened

Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal married in 1953 and endured tragedies that would have destroyed most couples. Their infant son Theo suffered brain damage when his pram was struck by a taxi in New York in 1960. Their daughter Olivia died of measles encephalitis at age seven in 1962. Then, in 1965, Neal suffered three massive cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child, leaving her in a coma for three weeks with severe brain damage.

Dahl threw himself into Neal's rehabilitation with characteristic intensity, developing a grueling therapy regimen using volunteers that fundamentally changed how stroke patients were treated. Neal relearned to walk and talk, and remarkably returned to acting, earning an Oscar nomination for 'The Subject Was Roses' in 1968. Their story was celebrated as one of the great love stories of the twentieth century and was adapted into a 1981 television film.

The celebrated love story concealed a darker reality. Dahl had been conducting an affair with Felicity D'Abreu Crosland, a friend of Neal's, for approximately eleven years. When Neal discovered the affair, she was devastated. The uncontested divorce was granted in London in 1983, with neither party appearing in court. Dahl married Felicity later that same year.

Neal later spoke publicly about the betrayal, expressing particular pain that the affair was with a woman she had considered a close friend. After thirty years of marriage and extraordinary shared adversity, the divorce left Neal to rebuild her life once more. She continued acting and doing public advocacy for stroke recovery until her death in 2010 at age eighty-four.

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