Patricia Neal learnt her seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, had died in the most brutal of ways.
The “gentle” little girl had been taken to hospital after contracting a complication of measles, but while her father, the then little-known author Roald Dahl, remained by her side, Hollywood star Patricia returned home briefly to check on the couple’s other children, Tessa and Theo.
She had no idea how serious Olivia’s condition was. But it was during that quick dash back home that the phone rang. It was the doctor, who spoke with devastating directness: “Mrs Dahl, your daughter is dead”.
Roald was so consumed with his own grief, he either did not feel able – or simply did not think – to break the tragedy more gently to his shellshocked wife.
It was a telling beginning to a period of “deep darkness” for the children’s writer in which he could not even utter Olivia’s name for months, and which threatened to tear he and his wife apart as he pushed her away and plunged into heavy drinking and streams of cruel verbal abuse which rocked their home.
This dark period lies at the centre of a new film, To Olivia, starring Hugh Bonneville and Keeley Hawes as the famous couple, which is released tomorrow night - Friday - on Sky Cinema.
It is based on the biography, Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life, written by the actress’s friend, Stephen Michael Shearer.
He saw Patricia’s anguish as she recalled that chilling call from hospital, back in November 1962, and heard firsthand about Roald’s destructive descent in to grief.
“He plunged into a deep darkness, his life became hell,” Stephen tells us.
“He was not sharing his grief, he was drinking a great deal. He was abusive, verbally, to Tessa and Pat. He ignored normal, everyday things. He was not thinking about the other children, he was consumed in his own grief.
“It was several months before he could even say Olivia’s name.
“Patricia felt she had lost her husband. She was not frightened of him, but frightened for him, she did not know if for his own sanity he could break through.”
His writing of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – the novel that would eventually land him acclaim as an author – was shelved for a year.
His one obsession became building a memorial on Olivia’s grave close to their home in to Great Missenden, Bucks – a perfect world of tiny figurines, animals and trees for the little girl he adored.
“He built a garden, a monument for her, and he was compulsive in his not letting her go,” explains Stephen.
“He was keeping her alive by doing it, it was an obsession for him.”
The couple’s youngest daughter Lucy, born in 1965, three years after Olivia’s death, recalled the magical land to rival those in her father’s stories.
She once described: “The grave was covered in miniature bonsai trees, lots and lots, and our responsibility was to keep them small. It was like a little world.
“Miniature figurines he would collect and put there, horses and sheep, little houses. The top of the grave covered them, unless you knew they were there you wouldn’t see them.
“We would go once a week without question. He would tell us stories about Olivia. He would say, ‘Look at this little horse I have bought her, she will love that’.”
The couple’s was already a complex marriage, ill-equipped to withstand tragedy, impacted by Roald’s often cold, guarded character - and by Patricia’s own admission not initially founded on true love, on her part at least.
The actress, already a Tinseltown star, and Roald, a handsome RAF officer, turned secret agent (pal of Ian Fleming), turned journalist, met at a dinner party in 1952.
She was a huge box office draw, having made her name in 1949’s controversial The Fountainhead and 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still, and admitted originally “loathing” the known womaniser for his rude manner.
Yet she fresh from heartbreak after her affair with married actor Gary Cooper broke down, following the abortion of their baby – a decision she always regretted.
And Stephen describes how Patricia was desperate to have children, and attracted to the enigmatic Englishman, recalls that need as driving her marriage to Roald the following year.
The pair eventually moved to Great Missenden full-time to raise their growing brood – Olivia, Tessa, the future mother of former model Sophie Dahl, and Theo.
But marriage for the two big personalities was never going to be easy.
Patricia was the main breadwinner initially, with films including 1961’s Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and Stephen suggests that wouldn’t have been easy to accept for her proud husband.
Meanwhile, he had expectations of a housewife who would dote on him.
Stephen explains: “She didn’t cook breakfast for him, she didn’t get up until noon.”
Indeed the author always communicated far more easily with children than adults, including his wife.
His own kids would be taken on magical car rides chasing hot air balloons, or woken in the night to whip up “witch’s potions” from canned pears, milk and food colouring.
“As a parent, he was different – he could talk to children on their level with understanding,” says Stephen.
And then tragedy struck.
In 1960, two years before Olivia’s measles, baby Theo was left brain-damaged when his pram was involved in a car accident. Fluid built up in his cranial cavity, leaving him blind.
Roald, ever driven by a need to control, threw himself into creating a ‘cerebral shunt’ for draining fluid alongside toymaker Stanley Wade and paediatric neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, which became known as the widely-used Dahl-Wade-Till (DWT) valve.
But then came the second tragedy he couldn’t control – Olivia’s rare reaction to measles, encephalitis, at a time when there was no vaccination against the disease.
But although his grief obliterated their home, in actual fact, Stephen explains it was ironically Roald’s eventual emergence from his grief-stricken “hell” as a more open and vulnerable man which allowed Patricia to properly fall in love with him.
The turning point came, he says, when Roald met with Geoffrey Fisher, his former headmaster, later named the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Played by the late Geoffrey Palmer in To Olivia – his last performance – Roald went to him for guidance, but it came in unexpected fashion.
“Geoffrey said ‘Think of a place where Olivia was happiest’,” describes Stephen. “And Roald said ‘Running about with her dogs’. And Geoffrey said ‘There are no dogs in heaven’.”
The claim sent Roald into angry meltdown – but one he finally shared with Patricia.
“I think it was at that moment he snapped and he finally opened up to Patricia in a release afterwards,” explains Stephen. “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,” he continues.
“She said it was an actual love, she felt something different.
“Before she idolised him, they had a great sex life, they had their children... But there was a deeper understanding when Olivia died, a truer love.”
It was in the aftermath of their grief both partners flourished creatively, Roald finishing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and finding success as a children’s writer, and Patricia winning a Best Actress Oscar for her role opposite Paul Newman in movie Hud.
The pair had another daughter, Ophelia in 1964.
But further tragedy lay ahead. In 1965, when pregnant with the couple’s fifth child, Lucy, just two years after her Oscar win, Patricia suffered three massive strokes and was in a coma for three weeks.
She was left paralysed on her right side, unable to walk, barely speak and partially blind.
Incredibly, with complete devotion – albeit with a gruelling regime considered “cruel” by friends – Roald helped nurse her back to almost full health within a year.
In 1968 she was back on the big screen in The Subject Was Roses, for which she won another Oscar nomination.
Perhaps the writing was on the wall their complex marriage could not last.
In 1983 they divorced after devastated Patricia discovered Roald’s 11-year affair with her close friend, Felicity Crosland – who became his second wife.
But she was always “grateful” to him for getting her back to full health.
She even put her hurt aside to visit him and Felicity shortly before his death aged 74 in 1990 - having sold mofre than 250 million books.
“She always called him Mr Dahl,” recalls Stephen, of the actress who died aged 84 in 2010. “There was always a deep respect there.”