Dahl could not say his daughter’s name after she died... he drank heavily & covered her grave with a miniature world
As a parent, he was different, he talked to children on their level
STEPHEN SHEARER ON AUTHOR ROALD DAHL
1951. She admitted at first “loathing” Roald, for his rude manner.
Her affair with married actor Gary Cooper had recently ended after she aborted their baby – a decision she always regretted.
Stephen says Patricia was desperate to have children, and that need led to her marriage to Roald in 1953.
They had Olivia in 1955, followed by Tessa in 1957, and Theo in 1960. When Theo was four months old, he suffered brain damage when his pram was hit by a cab in New York. Fluid built up in his cranial cavity, leaving him blind.
It drove Roald to work on a “cerebral shunt” for draining fluid, with toymaker Stanley Wade and paediatric neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, which became the widely-used Dahl-WadeTill (DWT) valve.
In 1961, the Dahls moved to Great Missenden, Bucks. Patricia was the main breadwinner initially, with films such as 1961 hit Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Stephen suggests that would have been hard for her proud husband to accept. He says: “She didn’t cook breakfast for him, she didn’t get up until noon.” Roald always communicated far more easily with children than adults. His children would be taken on magical car rides chasing hot air balloons, or woken up in the night to whip up “witch’s potions” from canned pears, milk and food colouring.
Stephen says: “As a parent, he was different – he could talk to children on their level with understanding.”
Aturning point in the Dahls’ marriage came as Roald emerged from the griefstricken “hell” of losing Olivia. Stephen tells how Roald asked Geoffrey Fisher, his old headmaster, for advice on coping with his grief.
Stephen writes: “Geoffrey said, ‘Think of a place where Olivia was happiest’. And Roald said, ‘Running about with her dogs’. And Geoffrey said, ‘There are no dogs in heaven’. It was at that moment he snapped and he finally opened up to Patricia. He could not fathom Olivia not being happy, running with her dogs and bunny rabbits. It was a breakthrough for him because he cried. Something he never did. And he said her name.
“I think Patricia loved him from that moment he opened up until the end of their marriage.”
In the aftermath of their grief, Roald and Patricia flourished creatively.
Roald finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Patricia won a Best Actress Oscar for her role opposite Paul Newman in Hud.
Patricia and Roald had another daughter, Ophelia, in 1964. But in 1965, when pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, Patricia suffered three massive strokes. She was left paralysed on one side, could barely speak and was partially blind. With devotion, and a gruelling regime thought “cruel” by friends, Roald helped Patricia regain almost full health within a year.
The couple divorced in 1983 after Patricia discovered Roald’s 11-year affair with her friend, Felicity Crosland, who became his second wife.
But she was always “grateful” to Roald for getting her back to health and visited him and Felicity shortly before his death, aged 74, in 1990.
“She always called him Mr Dahl,” says Stephen, of the actress, who died, aged 84, in 2010. “There was always a deep respect there.”