Popular actor became a star with ‘Love Story’
Ryan O’Neal, who became an instant movie star in the hit film “Love Story,” the highest-grossing movie of 1970, but who was later known as much for his personal life and health problems as for his acting in his later career, died Friday. He was 82.
His son Patrick confirmed the death in a post on Instagram. It did not give the cause or say where he died.
O’Neal was a familiar face on both big and small screens for a half-century. But he was never as famous as he was in the immediate aftermath of “Love Story.”
He was 29 years old and had spent a decade on television but had made only two other movies when he was chosen to star in Arthur Hiller’s sentimental romance, written by Erich Segal (who turned his screenplay into a bestselling novel). His performance as Oliver Barrett IV, a wealthy, golden-haired Harvard hockey player married to a dying woman played by Ali MacGraw, garnered him the only Academy Award nomination of his career.
He had played the town rich boy, Rodney Harrington, for five years on the prime-time soap opera “Peyton Place.” But in 1970, Hollywood was not that interested in television actors, and he had been far from the first choice to star in “Love Story.”
“Jon Voight turned the part down. Beau Bridges was supposed to do it,” he told a reporter in 1971. “When my name came up through Ali, they all said ‘No.’ Ali said, ‘Please meet him.’
“So we met in one of those conference rooms where everybody sits half a mile away from everybody else,” he continued. “Weeks later, they asked me to test. Then I didn’t hear anything until they finally called and said, ‘Will you give us an extension of a week to make up our minds?’ ”
In the end, MacGraw persuaded Paramount to cast O’Neal. He was hired for $25,000 (a little more than $200,000 in today’s currency), and his movie career was ignited.
He also demonstrated his knack for comedy in three films directed by Peter Bogdanovich. He co-starred with Barbra Streisand in “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a screwball comedy inspired by the 1938 Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie, “Bringing Up Baby”; with Burt Reynolds in “Nickelodeon” (1976), a valentine to the early days of moviemaking based on the reminiscences of Raoul Walsh and other directors; and, with his 9-year-old daughter, Tatum, in “Paper Moon” (1973), the best known of the three films he made with Bogdanovich.
Ryan O’Neal, who was well known in Hollywood for his temper — when he was 18, he spent 51 days in jail for a brawl at a New Year’s Eve party — was charged with assaulting his son Griffin in 2007. Those charges were dropped, but a year later, he and Redmond O’Neal, his son with actress Farrah Fawcett, were arrested on a drug charge. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to undergo counseling, while Redmond entered rehabilitation but continued to struggle with addiction.
Tatum O’Neal had her own highly publicized drug problems and was estranged for many years from her father, who she said physically abused her when she was a child.
Patrick Ryan O’Neal was born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1941, the elder son of Charles O’Neal, a screenwriter, and Patricia Callaghan O’Neal, an actress. At 17, he joined his nomadic parents in Germany and got his first taste of show business as a stuntman on the television series “Tales of the Vikings.”
He never took an acting lesson, but his striking good looks, as well as the anger that seemed to boil just below the surface, helped win him roles on television not long after he returned to Los Angeles.
O’Neal’s survivors include his daughter Tatum and son Patrick, a sportscaster. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In 2012, O’Neal revealed that he was being treated for prostate cancer. That diagnosis came 11 years after he contracted chronic myelogenous leukemia, which eventually went into remission.