The actor whose troubles eclipsed his talents
Ryan O’Neal 1941–2023
Ryan O’Neal seemed poised to become patriarch of a Hollywood dynasty. The blue-eyed, boyishly handsome actor achieved leading-man status in the 1970 tearjerker Love Story, and soon after starred opposite his real-life 9-year-old daughter, Tatum, in Peter Bogdanovich’s Depressionera comedy, Paper Moon. But years after Tatum became the youngest-ever Oscar winner for that role, she revealed that her father had hit her in a fit of jealousy over her nomination, the start of decades of physical and emotional abuse that included forcing drugs on her and her siblings. O’Neal went on to make few good films but many flops, including the 1978 Love Story sequel, Oliver’s Story. While he kept getting work, his family life suffered, and three of his four kids developed devastating drug addictions. “Is all this my fault?” he said in 2012. “I guess, yes.”
O’Neal was born in Los Angeles to a screenwriter father and actress mother who moved the family to Mexico and across Europe, said The New York Times. As a boy he was prone to fits of rage, which his father tried to channel with boxing lessons. While O’Neal never studied acting, “his striking good looks, as well as the anger that seemed to boil just below the surface,” helped him land a role in the prime-time soap Peyton Place. O’Neal got his only Oscar nomination at 29, for Love Story, said The Guardian (U.K.). He and Barbra Streisand memorably co-starred in What’s Up, Doc? in 1972 and reteamed for 1979’s The Main Event. But by the time he hit his 40s, good roles “seemed to go out of their way to avoid him.”
He became known for a “volatile, high-profile relationship” with Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett, said Vanity Fair, a 30-year romance marred by cheating and violence. At Fawcett’s 60th birthday party in 2007, O’Neal was arrested for firing a gun during a fight with his son Griffin. The following year, he and his son Redmond were arrested for meth possession. O’Neal, who had a recurring role in the TV drama Bones from 2006 to 2017, appeared in a reality series with Redmond and Tatum in which they tried to mend their relationship. Before he died, Tatum saw her father for the first time in three years. “He meant the world to me,” she said. “I loved him very much and know he loved me, too.”