Ryan O’Neal, who grew to become an immediate film star within the hit movie “Love Story,” the highest-grossing film of 1970, however who was later often known as a lot for the troubles of his private life as for his performing in his later profession, died on Friday. He was 82.
His son Patrick confirmed the dying in a put up on Instagram. It didn’t give the trigger or say the place he died.
Mr. O’Neal was a well-recognized face on each massive and small screens for a half-century, however he was by no means as well-known as he was after “Love Story.”
He was 29 years previous on the time and had spent a decade on tv however had made solely two different films when he was chosen to star in Arthur Hiller’s sentimental romance, written by Erich Segal, who turned his screenplay right into a best-selling novel. Mr. O’Neal’s efficiency in “Love Story” as Oliver Barrett IV, a rich, golden-haired Harvard hockey participant married to a dying lady performed by Ali MacGraw, garnered him the one Academy Award nomination of his profession.
He had performed the city wealthy boy, Rodney Harrington, for 5 years on the prime-time cleaning soap opera “Peyton Place.” However in 1970 Hollywood was not that all for tv actors, and he had been removed from the primary option to star in “Love Story.”
“Jon Voight turned the half down. Beau Bridges was alleged to do it,” he instructed a reporter in 1971. “When my identify got here up by Ali, all of them mentioned ‘No.’ Ali mentioned, ‘Please meet him.’”
“So we met in a kind of convention rooms the place all people sits half a mile away from all people else,” he continued. “Weeks later, they requested me to check. Then I didn’t hear something till they lastly known as and mentioned, ‘Will you give us an extension of per week to make up our minds?’”
In the long run, Ms. MacGraw persuaded Paramount to forged Mr. O’Neal. He was employed for $25,000 (somewhat greater than $200,000 in immediately’s forex), and his film profession was ignited.
It by no means burned fairly as brightly once more, though he maintained a excessive profile all through the Seventies, showing in movies like “Barry Lyndon” (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s elegantly photographed adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel a few poor 18th-century Irish boy who rises into English society after which falls from these heights; and “A Bridge Too Far” (1977), Richard Attenborough’s epic story of World Battle II heroism.
He additionally demonstrated his knack for comedy in three movies directed by Peter Bogdanovich. He co-starred with Barbra Streisand in “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972), a screwball comedy impressed by the 1938 Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn film “Bringing Up Child”; with Burt Reynolds in “Nickelodeon” (1976), a valentine to the early days of moviemaking based mostly on the reminiscences of Raoul Walsh and different administrators; and, along with his 9-year-old daughter, Tatum, in the very best identified of the three movies he made with Mr. Bogdanovich, “Paper Moon” (1973).
In “Paper Moon,” set within the Midwest in the course of the Melancholy, Mr. O’Neal performed a small-time swindler hornswoggled by a cigarette-smoking orphan who simply may be his illegitimate daughter. Tatum O’Neal received an Academy Award for that efficiency — she stays the youngest individual ever to win one of many 4 performing Oscars — and for some time it appeared that Mr. O’Neal would grow to be the patriarch of an performing dynasty.
When Tatum starred as a Little League pitcher in “The Unhealthy Information Bears” (1976), she grew to become the highest-paid baby star in historical past, with a wage of $350,000 (the equal of about $1.9 million immediately) and a share of the web earnings. Her youthful brother Griffin appeared poised for stardom as nicely when it was introduced that he would seem along with his father in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1979 remake of “The Champ,” the 1931 tear-jerker a few washed-up former boxer and his son.
However Mr. Zeffirelli ended up making the movie with Jon Voight and Ricky Schroder as an alternative, and Griffin O’Neal’s profession by no means received off the bottom. He did have one starring position, within the 1982 movie “The Escape Artist,” however that movie was not a hit. When he was subsequent within the public eye, 5 years later, it was not for his performing however for his involvement in a boating accident that killed his buddy Gian-Carlo Coppola, the son of the director Francis Ford Coppola. He was convicted of negligent operation of a ship however acquitted of manslaughter.
The O’Neal household would go on to have many extra issues with the regulation, with medicine and with each other.
Mr. O’Neal, who was well-known in Hollywood for his mood — when he was 18, he spent 51 days in jail for a brawl at a New Yr’s Eve occasion — was charged with assaulting his son Griffin in 2007. These expenses have been dropped, however a yr later he and Redmond O’Neal, his son with the actress Farrah Fawcett, have been arrested on a drug cost. He pleaded responsible and was ordered to endure counseling, whereas Redmond entered rehabilitation however continued to battle with dependancy.
Tatum O’Neal had her personal extremely publicized drug issues and was estranged for a few years from her father, who she mentioned bodily abused her when she was a baby.
Mr. O’Neal’s fame was starting to slide by 1978, when Paramount provided him $3 million to star in “Oliver’s Story,” a sequel to “Love Story.” He accepted, although his distaste for the venture was clear.
“There’s one thing low cost about sequels,” he instructed a reporter, “and this one’s a whole rip-off.” When the film was launched, the critics agreed.
His days as an A-list star have been quickly over, though he continued to work steadily within the Eighties and ’90s. His extra memorable films on this interval included “Companions” (1982), by which he performed a heterosexual police detective who goes beneath cowl with a homosexual companion, performed by John Damage; “Irreconcilable Variations” (1984), as a profitable Hollywood director whose 10-year-old daughter, performed by Drew Barrymore, sues him for divorce; and “Powerful Guys Don’t Dance” (1987), against the law drama written and directed by Norman Mailer. He additionally co-starred with Ms. Fawcett within the short-lived 1991 tv collection “Good Sports activities.”
Most of Mr. O’Neal’s later work was on tv, together with a recurring position on the collection “Bones.”
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 dad and mom in Germany and received his first style of present enterprise as a stunt man on the tv collection “Tales of the Vikings.”
He by no means took an performing lesson, however his hanging beauty, in addition to the anger that appeared to boil just under the floor, helped win him roles on tv not lengthy after he returned to Los Angeles.
His marriages to the actresses Joanna Moore and Leigh Taylor-Younger led to divorce. Ms. Taylor-Younger, his co-star on “Peyton Place,” instructed an interviewer that their marriage by no means recovered from the success of “Love Story,” which she mentioned introduced “a sort of life which isn’t appropriate for Ryan’s character.”
Mr. O’Neal was romantically linked with many actresses, nevertheless it was his on-again, off-again relationship with Ms. Fawcett, which started when she was nonetheless married to the actor Lee Majors, that garnered essentially the most consideration. The couple by no means married however have been collectively for nearly 20 years earlier than they separated in 1997. They later reconciled and have been residing collectively when Ms. Fawcett died of most cancers in 2009. In 2012 he printed a ebook about their relationship, “Each of Us: My Life With Farrah.”
Apart from his daughter, Tatum, and his son Patrick, a sportscaster, full info on his survivors was not instantly accessible.
In 2012, Mr. O’Neal revealed that he was being handled for prostate most cancers. That analysis got here 11 years after he contracted persistent myelogenous leukemia, which ultimately went into remission.
The final main position Mr. O’Neal performed was himself. In the summertime of 2011, he and his daughter starred in a actuality present, “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals,” on Oprah Winfrey’s cable channel, OWN. The collection left the impression that the 2 had ended their lengthy estrangement, however Mr. O’Neal later instructed an interviewer that it painted a false image.
“We’re additional aside now than we have been once we began the present,” he mentioned.
Peter Keepnews, Orlando Mayorquin and Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting.
