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 mentioned.
“My dad handed away peacefully at the moment, along with his loving group by his aspect supporting him and loving him as he would us,” Patrick O’Neal, a Los Angeles sportscaster, posted on Instagram.
Makes an attempt to succeed in O’Neal representatives weren’t instantly profitable.
He didn’t give a trigger. 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 all the time been my hero,” Patrick O’Neal wrote, including, “He’s a Hollywood legend. Full cease.”
O’Neal was among the many largest film stars on this planet within the Nineteen Seventies, who labored with most of the period’s most celebrated administrators together with Peter Bogdanovich on “Paper Moon” and Stanley Kubrick on “Barry Lyndon. He typically used his boyish, blond beauty to play males who hid shadowy or sinister backgrounds behind their clean-cut photos.
O’Neal maintained a gradual 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 cut 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 gained 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 typically satirized line: “Love means by no means having to say you’re sorry.”
The actor had at occasions strained relationships with three of his kids, together with estrangement from his daughter, squabbles with son Griffin and a drug-related arrest sparked by a probation test of his son Redmond. The non-public drama typically over-shadowed his later profession, though his makes an attempt to reconcile with Tatum O’Neal had been was a short-lived actuality collection.
O’Neal performed bit elements 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 large display screen with 1969’s “The Huge Bounce,” which co-stared his then-wife, Leigh Taylor-Younger. But it surely was “Love Story” that made him a film star.
The romantic melodrama grew to become certainly one of Paramount Photos’ largest hits and picked up seven Oscar nominations, together with one for greatest image. It gained for greatest music.
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 subsequent yr within the Melancholy-era con artist comedy “Paper Moon.”
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 ultimately helps redeem him.
Though critics praised each actors, the little lady’s brash efficiency overshadowed her father’s and made her the youngest individual in historical past to win an everyday Academy Award. She was 10 when the award was introduced in 1974. (Youthful performers resembling Shirley Temple have gained particular Oscars.)
The elder O’Neal’s subsequent main movie was Kubrick’s 18th century epic “Barry Lyndon,” during which he performed a poor Irish rogue who traveled Europe attempting to go himself off as an aristocrat.
Filming the three-hour film was tedious work, nevertheless, 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 and 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 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,” during which 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 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, acquired a neighborhood 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 films and ultimately returned to collection 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 preventing the clock.”
O’Neal started accepting extra supporting roles with the 1989 movie “Probabilities Are.” He started a second profession as a personality actor, enjoying 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 ultimately rekindled their romance within the 2000s. The unstable O’Neal household dynamics that had taxed their relationship earlier than, nevertheless, remained.
In 2007 the elder O’Neal was arrested in 2007 for alleged assault and firing a weapon in an altercation with Griffin, however fees 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 test 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 medication had 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 beginner boxer earlier than discovering his calling as a performer.