Ryan O’Neal, the heartthrob actor who went from a TV cleaning soap opera to an Oscar-nominated position in “Love Story” and delivered a wry efficiency reverse his charismatic 9-year-old daughter Tatum in “Paper Moon,” died Friday, his son stated.
“My dad passed away peacefully today, with his loving team by his side supporting him and loving him as he would us,” Patrick O’Neal, a Los Angeles sportscaster, posted on Instagram.
Makes an attempt to achieve O’Neal representatives weren’t instantly profitable.
No reason for dying was given. Ryan O’Neal was identified with prostate most cancers in 2012, a decade after he was first identified with power leukemia. He was 82.
“My father, Ryan O’Neal, has always been my hero,” Patrick O’Neal wrote, including, “He is a Hollywood legend. Full stop.”
O’Neal was among the many largest film stars on the planet within the Nineteen 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 beauty to play males who hid shadowy or sinister backgrounds behind their clean-cut pictures.
O’Neal maintained a gradual tv performing profession into his 70s within the 2010s, showing for stints on “Bones” and “Desperate 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 practically 30 years, and so they had a son, Redmond, born in 1985. The couple break up in 1997, however reunited a couple of years later. He remained by Fawcett’s facet as she battled most cancers, which killed her in 2009 at age 62.
Along 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 greatest supporting actress. He had son Patrick along with his second spouse, Leigh Taylor-Younger.
Ryan O’Neal had his personal best-actor Oscar nomination for the 1970 tear-jerker drama “Love Story,” co-starring Ali MacGraw, a few younger couple who fall in love, marry and uncover she is dying of most cancers. The film consists of the memorable, however usually satirized line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
The actor had at occasions 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 non-public drama usually over-shadowed his later profession, though his makes an attempt to reconcile with Tatum O’Neal had been changed into a short-lived actuality collection.
O’Neal performed bit components and carried out some stunt work earlier than claiming a lead position 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 massive display screen with 1969’s “The Big Bounce,” which co-stared his then-wife, Leigh Taylor-Younger. Nevertheless it was “Love Story” that made him a film star.
The romantic melodrama was the highest-grossing movie of 1970, grew to become one in all Paramount Photos’ largest hits and picked up seven Oscar nominations, together with one for greatest image. It received for greatest music.
After “Love Story” made him a significant film star, O’Neal was thought-about for seemingly each main main position 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?” The filmmaker solid him the next 12 months within the Melancholy-era con artist comedy “Paper Moon.”
In it, O’Neal performed an unscrupulous Bible salesman preying on widows he positioned 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 woman’s brash efficiency overshadowed her father’s and made her the youngest particular person in historical past to win a daily Academy Award. She was 10 when the award was offered in 1974. (Youthful performers akin to Shirley Temple have received particular Oscars.)
The elder O’Neal’s subsequent main movie was Kubrick’s 18th century epic “Barry Lyndon,” wherein he performed a poor Irish rogue who traveled Europe making an attempt to go 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 and so they 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 O’Neal 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 guide about his relationship with Fawcett.
“A door inside me locked the morning the telegram came, and I am still blindly searching for the key to open it,” O’Neal wrote in “Both of Us.”
O’Neal’s profession cooled additional within the Eighties with the emerald heist drama “Green Ice” (1981) and the 1984 comedy “Irreconcilable Differences,” wherein he performed a busy father in an sad marriage whose daughter, performed by 9-year-old Drew Barrymore, tries to divorce her dad and mom.
The last decade was additionally a low-point in O’Neal’s private life. His son Griffin confronted quite a few brushes with the legislation, 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 short stint in jail because of this.
Along with his Hollywood standing diminishing, Ryan O’Neal started showing in TV films and finally returned to collection tv reverse then-lover Fawcett with the 1991 sitcom “Good Sports,” however the present ran just one season.
Each acknowledged the work put a pressure on their relationship.
“We get into fights,” O’Neal stated in 1991. “She’s tough. She expects to be treated well. On a set that can get lost when you’re trying to create a moment and you’re fighting the clock.”
O’Neal started accepting extra supporting roles with the 1989 movie “Chances Are.” He started a second profession as a personality actor, enjoying a husband who hires a hitman to kill his spouse in “Faithful” (1996) and a mysterious tycoon within the blackmail comedy “Zero Effect” (1998).
By then his relationship with Fawcett had ended, though they remained shut and finally rekindled their romance within the 2000s. The unstable 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 prices had 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 house 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 medication had been his. He stated he confiscated them from his son and was making an attempt 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.
