Patricia Neal

Actress Patricia Neal passed away. Her first movie was with Ronald Reagan. She was also in Face in the Crowd, alongside Andy Griffith and Walter Matthau. (One line I vaguely remember from that, from a conservative politician whom Andy Griffith was teaching to be “woodsy”: “Daniel Boone didn’t need no Social Security. All he needed was his ax!”) She was also in the movie of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, looking at Howard Roark’s bulging, individualist muscles.

But I most appreciate her from an episode of Little House on the Prairie, in which she played the dying mother of three children, whom Mr. Edwards and his wife, Grace, adopted. Sawyer watched that particular episode on an episode of Lost this last season, in the flash sideways.

R.I.P., Patricia Neal.