Tatum O’Neal wants to work — and not be marginalized
Tatum O’Neal has gone through good times and bad times, but she’s still here. And as feisty and candid as ever.
She has a small but pivotal role in “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness,” the latest entry in the successful faith-based movie franchise. She also started an interview podcast, “Tatum, Verbatim,” last year; she’s looking for a new producer.
“I’m gonna find a new home for it,” she said in a recent interview in Beverly Hills, Calif. “I don’t want to stop. I thought it was a great thing for me. I love interviewing people.”
In “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness,” she plays a university administrator who wants to remove the church of a pastor (David A.R. White) from campus.
“They were lovely to me on this movie,” she said. “They treated me with so much respect. I hope if they make another one, they’ll think of me.”
White, who is also a producer on the film, said that when O’Neal’s name came up for the role, he thought, “This feels right.”
“She couldn’t have been nicer,” he said. “I think sometimes when people go through these different addictions, their spirit has softened a lot to where now they want to love people, and that’s kind of what I feel like Tatum is at.”
For most of O’Neal’s 54 years, her life has been an open book.
She’s the youngest actress ever to win an Academy Award. She captured the Oscar for supporting actress at age 10 for Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 film “Paper Moon,” which also stars her father, Ryan O’Neal.
But her life has been no Hollywood fairy tale.
In her 2004 memoir, “A Paper Life,” and her 2011 follow-up, “Found: A Daughter’s Journey Home,” she talks about living with her younger brother Griffin on her mother Joanna Moore’s ramshackle ranch after Moore and Ryan O’Neal divorced. Tatum O’Neal alleged she was beaten by her mother’s teenage boyfriend and molested at age 6.
She and her brother went to live with Ryan O’Neal when she was 8, but they had to deal with her father’s volatile temper. At age 14 she became involved with a married stuntman on the set of “International Velvet.” Later, her father left her and her brother alone as teenagers after he moved in with Farrah Fawcett.
Tatum O’Neal was no stranger to drugs before she married tennis star John McEnroe in 1986; the couple had three children, Kevin, Sean and Emily. After they separated in 1992, O’Neal became hooked on heroin and lost custody of her children.
But she got clean and got back her children. Save for a relapse in 2008, when she was arrested for trying to buy cocaine, O’Neal has been sober.
Nowadays, women in Hollywood have been emboldened to talk about sexual abuse and harassment by the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. O’Neal said she had no such support when she wrote her first book.
“I remember Katie Couric said, ‘So, if you were on these drugs, like you said you were, how do you remember all that stuff that’s in your book?’ I said, ‘Katie, how do you forget? How do you forget being molested?’ ” O’Neal recalled.
She said she’s happy to see women protecting women now “and standing by them instead of tearing them down.”
Though O’Neal has continued to work, most notably on FX’s “Rescue Me,” she said it’s not as much as “I need to and not as much as I want to.”
She said she wants to know why it’s “OK to marginalize a woman who’s been around as long as I have, who had an addiction issue, and not do it to my male colleagues?”