Neva Patterson (born February 10, 1922 in Nevada, Iowa, U.S.) is an American character actress who has starred in movies, on television, and on Broadway.
In 1952 she created the role of the wife, "Helen", in the original cast of The Seven Year Itch at the Fulton Theatre, New York City.
Her first feature movie was in 1953 movie Taxi, and other movie credits include The Buddy Holly Story, and All of Me.
Neva Patterson starred in the TV series Nichols as Ma Ketcham from 1971-1972. She also starred in the TV series Doc Elliot as Margaret 'Mags' Brimble, and on the TV series The Governor and J.J. as Maggie McLeod. She has also starred in many TV movies; one of her best known TV movie roles was on the 1983 NBC hit mini series V as Eleanor Dupres, the corrupt mother of the resistance leader Mike Donovan. Neva reprised her role in the 1984 hit sequel V: The Final Battle.
She has made guest appearances on many TV shows; some of those appearances range from The Defenders, Ironside, Barnaby Jones, The Dukes of Hazzard, and St. Elsewhere.
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 (1968), 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 "Governor & J.J., The" (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 (III), who died in 2002. Neva has been retired since the 1990s.
