LOS ANGELES — Ryan O’Neal, the heartthrob actor who went from a TV cleaning soap opera to an Oscar-nominated function in “Love Story” and delivered a wry efficiency reverse his charismatic 9-year-old daughter Tatum in “Paper Moon,” died Friday, his son mentioned.
“My dad handed away peacefully in the present day, together with his loving staff by his aspect supporting him and loving him as he would us,” Patrick O’Neal, a Los Angeles sportscaster, posted on Instagram.
No reason for dying was given. Ryan O’Neal was recognized with prostate most cancers in 2012, a decade after he was first recognized with continual leukemia. He was 82.
“My father, Ryan O’Neal, has all the time been my hero,” Patrick O’Neal wrote, including, “He’s a Hollywood legend. Full cease.”
“He meant the world to me. I liked him very a lot and know he liked me too,” Tatum O’Neal informed Individuals journal in a press release. “I’ll miss him eternally. and I really feel very fortunate that we ended on such good phrases.”
Ryan O’Neal was among the many greatest film stars on this planet within the Seventies, working throughout genres with lots of the period’s most celebrated administrators together with Peter Bogdanovich on “Paper Moon” and “What’s Up, Doc?” and Stanley Kubrick on “Barry Lyndon.” He usually used his boyish, blond attractiveness to play males who hid shadowy or sinister backgrounds behind their clean-cut pictures.
O’Neal maintained a gentle tv performing profession into his 70s within the 2010s, showing for stints on “Bones” and “Determined Housewives,” however his longtime relationship with Farrah Fawcett and his tumultuous household life saved him in information.
Twice divorced, O’Neal was romantically concerned with Fawcett for almost 30 years, they usually had a son, Redmond, born in 1985. The couple break up in 1997, however reunited a number of years later. He remained by Fawcett’s aspect as she battled most cancers, which killed her in 2009 at age 62.
Together with his first spouse, Joanna Moore, O’Neal fathered actors Griffin O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal, his co-star within the 1973 film “Paper Moon,” for which she received an Oscar for finest supporting actress. He had son Patrick together with his second spouse, Leigh Taylor-Younger.
Ryan O’Neal had his personal finest actor Oscar nomination for the 1970 tear-jerker drama “Love Story,” co-starring Ali MacGraw, a couple of younger couple who fall in love, marry and uncover she is dying of most cancers. The film contains the memorable, however usually satirized line: “Love means by no means having to say you are sorry.”
The actor had at instances strained relationships with three of his youngsters, together with estrangement from his daughter, squabbles with son Griffin and a drug-related arrest sparked by a probation verify of his son Redmond. The private drama usually over-shadowed his later profession, though his makes an attempt to reconcile with Tatum O’Neal have been changed into a short-lived actuality sequence.
O’Neal performed bit components and carried out some stunt work earlier than claiming a lead function on the prime-time cleaning soap opera “Peyton Place” (1964-69), which additionally made a star of Mia Farrow.
From there O’Neal jumped to the large display screen with 1969’s “The Massive Bounce,” which co-stared his then-wife, Taylor-Younger. But it surely was “Love Story” that made him a film star.
The romantic melodrama was the highest-grossing movie of 1970, turned considered one of Paramount Photos’ greatest hits and picked up seven Oscar nominations, together with one for finest image. It received for finest music.
After “Love Story” made him a serious film star, O’Neal was thought of for seemingly each main main function in Hollywood. Paramount even pushed for him to to star as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” earlier than Al Pacino obtained the half on the insistence of director Francis Ford Coppola.
O’Neal then starred for Bogdanovich as a bumbling professor reverse Barbra Streisand within the 1972 screwball comedy “What’s Up, Doc?”
“So unhappy to listen to the information of Ryan O’Neal’s passing,” Streisand, who additionally starred with O’Neal within the 1979 boxing rom-com “The Principal Occasion,” posted on Instagram. “He was humorous and charming, and he shall be remembered.”
The 12 months after “What’s Up, Doc?” Bogdanovich forged him within the Despair-era con artist comedy “Paper Moon.”
In it, O’Neal performed an unscrupulous Bible salesman preying on widows he situated via obituary notices. His real-life daughter, Tatum, performed a trash-talking, cigarette-smoking orphan who wants his assist — and finally helps redeem him.
Though critics praised each actors, the little lady’s brash efficiency overshadowed her father’s and made her the youngest particular person in historical past to win a aggressive Academy Award. She was 10 when the award was introduced in 1974. (Youthful performers reminiscent of Shirley Temple have received particular Oscars.)
The elder O’Neal’s subsequent main movie was Kubrick’s 18th century epic “Barry Lyndon,” through which he performed a poor Irish rogue who traveled Europe attempting to cross himself off as an aristocrat.
Filming the three-hour film was tedious work, nonetheless, and Kubrick’s infamous perfectionism created a rift between him and the actor that by no means healed.
O’Neal then reteamed with Tatum in Bogdanovich’s early Hollywood comedy “Nickelodeon” (1976). However the movie was a flop they usually by no means labored collectively once more. An try to capitalize on his “Love Story” character, Oliver Barrett, with the sequel “Oliver’s Story” (1978) resulted in one other flop.
Father and daughter drifted aside as Tatum grew older, with the elder actor studying about his daughter’s marriage to tennis nice John McEnroe by a belated telegram, Ryan O’Neal wrote in a 2012 e-book about his relationship with Fawcett.
“A door inside me locked the morning the telegram got here, and I’m nonetheless blindly trying to find the important thing to open it,” O’Neal wrote in “Each of Us.”
O’Neal’s profession cooled additional within the Eighties with the emerald heist drama “Inexperienced Ice” (1981) and the 1984 comedy “Irreconcilable Variations,” through which he performed a busy father in an sad marriage whose daughter, performed by 9-year-old Drew Barrymore, tries to divorce her mother and father.
The last decade was additionally a low-point in O’Neal’s private life. His son Griffin confronted quite a few brushes with the regulation, together with a 1986 boating accident that killed Gian-Carlo Coppola, 23, son of film director Francis Ford Coppola in Maryland. Griffin O’Neal was convicted of negligently and recklessly working a ship, obtained a group service sentence and later served a quick stint in jail in consequence.
Together with his Hollywood standing diminishing, Ryan O’Neal started showing in TV motion pictures and finally returned to sequence tv reverse then-lover Fawcett with the 1991 sitcom “Good Sports activities,” however the present ran just one season.
Each acknowledged the work put a pressure on their relationship.
“We get into fights,” O’Neal mentioned in 1991. “She’s robust. She expects to be handled properly. On a set that may get misplaced once you’re attempting to create a second and also you’re combating the clock.”
O’Neal started accepting extra supporting roles with the 1989 movie “Possibilities Are.” He started a second profession as a personality actor, taking part in a husband who hires a hitman to kill his spouse in “Devoted” (1996) and a mysterious tycoon within the blackmail comedy “Zero Impact” (1998).
By then his relationship with Fawcett had ended, though they remained shut and finally rekindled their romance within the 2000s. The risky O’Neal household dynamics that had taxed their relationship earlier than, nonetheless, remained.
In 2007 the elder O’Neal was arrested in 2007 for alleged assault and firing a weapon in an altercation with Griffin, however expenses have been by no means pursued. Their son Redmond was repeatedly arrested, jailed and spent a number of years in court-mandated rehab.
A probation verify on Redmond O’Neal in September 2008 at his father’s Malibu residence led to the actor’s arrest for methamphetamine possession. Ryan O’Neal pleaded responsible to the cost and entered a drug diversion program, however he publicly denied the medicine have been his. He mentioned he confiscated them from his son and was attempting to guard him.
Charles Patrick Ryan O’Neal was born on April 20, 1941, and was the son of screenwriter Charles O’Neal and actor Patricia Callaghan O’Neal. O’Neal hung out as a lifeguard and an newbie boxer earlier than discovering his calling as a performer.
___
AP Leisure Author Andrew Dalton contributed.