This edgy, somewhat hard-looking character actress, known by face perhaps as opposed to name, was a familiar presence in heavily-styled drama of the 1950s and '60s. Born in 1920 (some sources say 1922) and raised in Nevada, Neva Patterson's father was a mailman. She loved putting on plays at home (along with her brother, Harlon) and eventually worked as an usher at Nevada's Circle Theatre. She graduated from high school in 1937 and found secretarial jobs to make do until moving to New York the next year. She worked long and hard at various jobs as a secretary, hotel singer and bit part performer before finally making her Broadway bow in "The Druid Circle" in 1947. By this time, she had married a professional dancer, but they divorced in 1948. More plays came her way with "Ring Round the Moon" in 1950 and "The Seven-Year Itch" two years later. Television became a viable medium for her in the late 1940s, and by 1957 had more than 400 dramas to her credit. She appeared sporadically in film supports with Taxi (1953), her debut, The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), Desk Set (1957), Too Much, Too Soon (1958), David and Lisa (1962), Dear Heart (1964), and Counterpoint (1967), to name a few. Her brittle, overwrought ladies were notoriously glamorous, usually business-oriented, and more often than not quite overbearing. She continued on in this fashion with TV and graced such short-lived series as "The Governor & J.J." (1969) as the secretary to governor Dan Dailey in 1969; "Nichols" (1971) wherein she played a powerful, corruptible matriarch opposite James Garner; and 1974's _Doc Elliot_ as a widow and frequent confidante to medic James Franciscus. None of these lasted more than a season. In 1980, she made a brief Broadway comeback as a replacement in "Romantic Comedy." Married three times altogether, she adopted two children with third husband writer James Lee, who died in 2002. Neva has been retired since the 1990s.