To Patricia Neal, Adoringly

Dear Patricia Neal,

I heart you.

I must tell you I was afraid you would disappoint, and you did, in a way, at first.

You see, I found Howard Roark in the Courtyard Cafe - he had red hair and a complex face, and I liked the way he ducked his head to go out the door because he was too tall. I could imagine him with a pencil in his hand, shooting confident lines up into buildings. I found Gail Wynand at my work, a city bar, in a business suit drinking a beer. He was handsome regal gentleman with shiny skin. I found these people in my daily life as I read The Fountainhead - a beautiful book which inspires cinematic thought - and cast them leading roles in my in-house film adaptation. But I could not find Dominique. Nobody was good enough.

I tried to find her several times. I would pass a feline blonde in a pinstriped suit in Martin Place, and examine her face quite inappropriately, before finding her wanting. I also considered another blonde who is in my Advanced Media Writing class. But she did not have enough of Dominique's potency.

And neither did you, though I was hoping you would, as Rand's choice, and all that. But you were not the pointy-cornered woman of Rand's novel that I imagined. Icy and remote and unassailable is Rand's written Dominique, but Patricia Neal, your eyes betrayed you. They are too soft. Don't feel bad though; Dominique is not quite human. The closest actress to suit the job of Miss Francon to me would be Uma Thurman in Gattaca. Funnily enough, it is a super-human she plays in this film, a designer baby with perfect genes. That's what a good cinematic representation of Dominique might have taken.

In any case, Patricia Neal, you were stunning regardless. You were more than beautiful. Your face is enchanting. I like your imperfect eyebrows. You overshadowed everyone, even Gary Cooper's Howard Roark. You are a Movie Star. You are a movie legend. You are immortal forever.

You know, I never would have seen you had you not been a Movie Star. I never would have known there was such person as you. Don't you think that is strange? And maybe even stranger is that now I love you. I feel like I know you. After all, I've heard your voice, seen how you walk, seen how expressions work over your face, know that you are a little bit of an over actor (oh, no offence of course). Your youth and beauty would have been forgotten by the world, which now only sees in your true flesh the face of an old woman. The cinema screen has made you a celebrity and a star. Even in your old age they remember the beauty you once were. That slender and cat-eyed woman standing atop a quarry wearing riding breechers.

Neal Oxenhandler, a film writer, says that celebrities live in a special fluid or medium "like aquarium fish". It is true. The cinema has placed you, and Anna May Wong, and Rose Hobart Grace Kelly, and Greta Garbo, and Ava Gardner, and Marilyn Monroe, and Brigitte Bardot, and Judy Garland, and Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlene Dietrich, into a glass tank filled with some sort of amniotic fluid that keeps you alive, immortal. Even when you die, you will still move, smile, breathe, laugh, in your museum box, and we will lavish our collective love upon you forever.

I loved The Fountainhead in its novel form too much to make any allowances for the needs of film. In fact I do not believe that it is a translatable novel: it is too big, too ideas-based, too good at what it does. It must have a literary, not cinematic voice as its authority and backbone and charm. But I am glad they made a movie because you were in it. You turned this film not into a second-rate adaptation, but into something all of its own, staring you, about you. You in dozens of gowns, your hair coiffed kittenishly, your limbs lithe, your mouth set into an intense line, your eyes always pointed achingly off into the distance. You falling down stupidly, whimpering histrionically, whacking Gary Cooper across the face with your riding crop and careering off on your histrionic horse.

I am a university student, Patricia Neal, and I have been doing a course on cinematic modernism. We have thus been discussing how a film is experienced and remembered as much as its content. We have also watched a film by Joseph Cornell called Rose Hobart. Perhaps you know it? In it, Cornell appears to remember East of Borneo only through Rose Hobart, the actress, as the actress. In the same manner, I remember The Fountainhead in its film form only through you, as you, not as Dominique, who I don't think will ever be translatable into real human form to me. I remember your face - the beautiful film star face - the face that the camera adores, and men and women.

So Patricia Neal, you have not disappointed me at all. I am glad that I got to meet you.

I would be so chuffed if you would consider sending me back an autograph.

Respectfully,

Vanessa