Ryan O’Neal, the heartthrob actor who went from a TV soap opera to an Oscar-nominated role in Love Story and delivered a wry performance opposite his charismatic 9-year-old daughter Tatum in Paper Moon, died on Friday, his son said.
“My dad passed away peacefully today, with his loving team by his side supporting him and loving him as he would us,” Patrick O’Neal, a Los Angeles sportscaster, posted on Instagram. No cause of death was given. O’Neal was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2012, a decade after he was first diagnosed with chronic leukemia. He was 82.
O’Neal was among the biggest movie stars in the world in the 1970s, working across genres with many of the era’s most celebrated directors including Peter Bogdanovich on Paper Moon and What’s Up, Doc? and Stanley Kubrick on Barry Lyndon.
O’Neal maintained a steady television acting career into his 70s in the 2010s, appearing for stints on Bones and Desperate Housewives, but his relationship with Farrah Fawcett and his tumultuous family life kept him in the news.
Twice divorced, O’Neal was romantically involved with Fawcett for nearly 30 years. They had a son, Redmond, born in 1985. The couple split in 1997 but reunited a few years later. He remained by Fawcett’s side as she battled cancer till her death in 2009 at age 62.
With his first wife, Joanna Moore, O’Neal fathered Griffin O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal, his co-star in the 1973 movie Paper Moon, for which she won a best supporting actress Oscar. He had a son Patrick with a second wife, Leigh Taylor-Young.
O’Neal had his own best actor Oscar nomination for the 1970 tear-jerker drama Love Story, co-starring Ali MacGraw, about a young couple who fall in love, marry and discover she is dying of cancer. The movie includes the memorable, but often satirised line: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
O’Neal played bit parts and performed some stunt work before claiming a lead role on the prime-time soap opera Peyton Place (1964-69), which also made a star of Mia Farrow. From there O’Neal jumped to the big screen with 1969’s The Big Bounce, which co-starred his then-wife, Taylor-Young. But it was Love Story that made him a movie star.
