We remember the rural side of Patricia Neal

Memorial services are being held today in Knoxville for Patricia Neal, the Academy Award winning actress who grew up in the East Tennessee city after spending the first three years of her life in a Kentucky coal camp. She often spent summers with her Aunt Maude in Williamsburg, Ky., and won the best-actress Oscar for the 1963 cowboy drama Hud, but said her favorite role was as a radio reporter who turned a rural radio talker (Andy Griffith) into a national political figure in 1957's still-relevant A Face In the Crowd (above). She starred in Bright Leaf (1950), a film about the North Carolina tobacco industry, and returned to her rural Appalachian roots as the matriarch in "The Homecoming: A Christmas Story," the 1970 TV special that spawned "The Waltons."

Most of this week's stories about Neal focus on her tragic personal life; we'll stick to the rural route. David Thomson of The Guardian may make too much of Neal's Kentucky connections, but makes an interesting rural point as he writes, "Though Kentucky is written off by American sophisticates as just too damned remote, the state plays an important part in movie history. Starting with D.W. Griffith, moving on to Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Johnny Depp, Ned Beatty and George Clooney, the only other state I can think of where out-of-the-way-ness is offset by a grand cast of actors is Nebraska. This isn't just a trivial pursuit. It's a way of suggesting that sometimes large, pretending ambitions can come out of the rural hinterland." (Read more)

The Knoxville News-Sentinel has plenty of coverage and a handy list of links to other stories, and the Lexington Herald-Leader's Rich Copley has an appreciation. Keith Runyon, opinion editor of The Courier-Journal, reprints the story he wrote in 1973 about "Patsy" Neal's homecoming to Knoxville and Williamsburg. UPDATE, Nov. 29: On the 93rd birthday of my recently departed mother, who grew up and worked in an near Knoxville, and admired Patricia Neal, I discovered that Obit Magazine highlighted a Neal obituary by Gigi Anders. To read it, click here.