Patricia Neal was never what I would consider to be any classic babe, but I admired the hell out of her, just based on three performances. It was she who halted the menacing alien robot Gort with the famous phrase "Klaatu borada nikto" in "The Day the Earth Stood Still." (Sadly, she considered the whole thing rather silly.) It was she who first created and then was obliged to destroy homespun pundit Lonesome Rhodes in "A Face in the Crowd," which remains as biting a comment on politicized media as ever. And it was she who strove to match Ayn Rand's insane standard of heroism in "The Fountainhead." It had long been rumored that Ayn Rand's work was unfilmable, and "Fountainhead" proved that, yet Neal somehow survived the experiment. She was unusual and brave, desiring Gary Cooper yet somehow winding up married to Roald Dahl. I wish there were more like her.