R.I.P. Ryan O’Neal, star of Barry Lyndon and Love Story
Despite a tarnished reputation, O'Neal appeared in everything from Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon to a recurring part on Fox procedural Bones
Aux News Ryan O'Neal
Ryan O’Neal has died. As first a TV star, and then an Oscar-nominated actor—for box office smash Love Story, in 1970—O’Neal had a celebrated run as a performer throughout the 1960s and ’70s, before both his public reputation and his career were tarnished by a mixture of diminishing returns, box office failures, and allegations of abusive behavior from the women and children in his life. Per TMZ, O’Neal’s death was confirmed on Friday by his son, Patrick. O’Neal was 82.
Born into a Hollywood family—his father was prolific genre screenwriter Charles O’Neal—the younger O’Neal initially trained as a boxer in high school, before getting into acting, ironically, after the family moved from California to Germany for a few years in the 1950s. A series of guest star stints on TV in the early 1960s led to a casting as a regular in ABC prime-time soap Peyton Place, which served as a launching pad for a number of its young stars—including O’Neal.
In 1969, O’Neal got his first starring role in a movie, appearing as the lead in poorly received Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce. But it wasn’t until the next year that his career truly exploded, when he starred as young would-be lawyer Oliver in Arthur Hiller’s Love Story, which swiftly became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Starring opposite Ali McGraw, O’Neal garnered the Oscar nod for his role, which evolves from young lover to soon-to-be widower as the film’s melodramatic (but undeniably affecting) narrative progresses.
Love Story’s success paved the way for the next decade of O’Neal’s career, which was marked by a series of critical—if not always commercial—successes. Several of these came at the hands of director Peter Bogdanovich, who cast O’Neal as the male lead in films like What’s Up Doc?, Nickelodeon, and 1973's Paper Moon—the latter of which also starred O’Neal’s then 10-year-old daughter Tatum, in a star-making turn as a young con artist. Other directors who worked with O’Neal during this era included Walter Hill (who praised the actor’s work on his 1978 crime thriller The Driver) and Stanley Kubrick, who placed O’Neal in the title role of his ill-fated historical epic Barry Lyndon.
Despite appreciation of the film’s gorgeous look, and a later critical re-appraisal of the movie by modern audiences, Lyndon played a major part in killing the idea that O’Neal was an automatic box-office draw—something hammered home when he decided to make Oliver’s Story, a sequel to Love Story, in 1978. The film, co-starring Candace Bergen, was a failure from both a critical and a box-office perspective, and marked a major decline in O’Neal’s career over the next several years, which saw him spend far more time in comedy than drama, and often to rough effect.
More pertinently, the 1980s also saw more and more stories emerge about O’Neal’s personal life, few of them positive. His son Griffin publicly accused his father of physically abusing him in 1983, and would later allege that his dad forced him to use cocaine when he was just 11 years old; Tatum would later write in her autobiography that she was sexually assaulted by one of her father’s drug dealers while still just a child, and physically abused by the man himself. O’Neal was also noted for numerous affairs, despite being in a long-term relationship with Farah Fawcett; in a 2014 memoir, Anjelica Huston wrote that O’Neal physically abused her during a romantic relationship. Stretching across multiple decades, the stories paint a portrait of violent and distressing behavior, despite occasional moments of reconciliation; 2010 saw O’Neal work with Tatum for a short-lived reality show, The O’Neals, but a 2015 interview with Griffin asserted that he hadn’t seen his father for several years, ever since the elder O’Neal apparently shot at him during an altercation over the sobriety struggles of Griffin’s half-brother, Redmond, the son of O’Neal and Fawcett.
Despite it all, O’Neal continued to work up until 2017, mostly in a recurring part on Fox procedural Bones. (Playing, with some obvious subtext, the estranged criminal father of the show’s main character, played by Emily Deschanel.) O’Neal was diagnosed with chronic leukemia in 2001, and prostate cancer in 2012; no cause of death has been, as yet, revealed.
49 Comments
Oh Man, Oh God, Oh Man, Oh God, Oh Man!
Somebody had to do it
yep
The preantepenultimate pinnacle of thespianism, a truly enervating performance.
I couldn’t watch a film for months after this.
It’s weird how great a bad actor sleepwalking through a role can be, like he was in Barry Lyndon.He was playing a psychopath though, so maybe just the natural vibes he gave off did it.
He was in some exceptional films.Barry Lyndon and Paper Moon stand out for me.
I’m a ride-or-die “What’s Up, Doc” man myself.
He was a great straight man against Barbra.I had such a crush on him after watching the network TV broadcast of The Main Event. Then, years later, I read Tatum’s (also a big fan of hers—Amanda Whurlitzer was a role model) autobiography. His jealousy because she got the Oscar he never managed to get was cringeworthy. Like, dude, you’re competing with a literal child. His grossness was writ large after her book.
I say with some shame that I’ve never seen Paper Moon, but it looks like he’s sorta doing the same thing from the bits I’ve seen.OTOH, I really liked him as a nice guy in a stupid movie where Robert Downy Jr dies and comes back as his friend or something.
I also saw part of a movie a long time ago where he was very sympathetic as an undercover cop (I think) stuck in jail in assless chaps (or you know, chaps).
‘So Fine’- his family clothing company sells designer jeans with clear plastic panels in the butt.Hijinks ensue…
He was down with the Bitches and HO’s. RIP.
Please watch The Driver. You will not regret it!
Harvard’s mocking of Love Story during orientation is one of the few things I genuinely laugh at about the undergraduate experience there – since the link probably won’t work, just search for the article “The Disease: Fatal. The Treatment: Mockery” from the NYT in 2010.
Francis LaPierre sends his condolences.
As someone who has cycled through Bones in reruns many times, he was always a highlight. It was a reminder of just how charismatic of an actor he could be when not a mess. It’s a shame his demons often got the better of him and impacted his kids so much. Paper Moon is a great film and great performances by both father and daughter.
Look, Brian Blessed can’t be everywhere at once to help every drunken thespian.
RIP.
Oh, god! Oh, man!
Irreconcilable Differences remains one of my favorite films of the 80s and my favorite film about Hollywood ever made.Ryan was great as the sleazy director who dumps wife Shelley Long for a stunningly beautiful and awful actress Sharon Stone and then daughter Drew Barrymore sues for emancipation. Sharon Stone sings in a brilliantly horrific “musical re-make of Gone With the Wind.”
“Works for me!”
I think that may actually be the only Ryan O’Neal movie I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen it like 50 times. Just fantastic.
I’ve seen it so many times and it just gets funnier and more scathing with age.
Bringing it back to O’Neil, imagine being the guy who is such a Hollywood sleaze ball, Ryan O’Neil thinks you need to be taken down a peg. And yet Bogdanovich went to his grave thinking of himself as an under appreciated genius and his movies with Shepherd and without Polly Platt as brilliant.
A totally underrated film and should be seen a lot more. Bonus points because O’Neil was doing an impression of his Paper Moon director, Peter Bogdanovich. For those that don’t know, the movie is loosely based on the divorce of Bogdanovich and his first wife, Polly Platt. The Sharon Stone character is a pretty vicious lampoon of Cybil Shepherd. And O’Neil, who was not a great person by all accounts, did some of his best work in that film.
Sharon Stone singing that awful song as Scarlet O’Hara remains one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever seen. “This Civil War…ain’t gonna get me doooooown. I’m moving my act to a brand new toooooown!” Such a sick burn on Bogdanovich and Cybil Shepard and it’s such a shame this film is not streaming anywhere.
There’s an episode of ALF where Irreconcilable Differences is cited as a “bad Ryan O’Neal movie”. Well I don’t know what they look for in films on Melmac, but to us Earthlings it’s pretty good.
Doesn’t Long’s charcater become an extremely famous author after she’s dumped? I hope that’s the one.
That’s the one! She writes a best-selling book about how awful her husband (Ryan O’Neal) was and Sharon Stone dumps him for her limo guy.
How serendipitous. I’m working on a project like that myself – not about a husband. I’d be happy for “A dozen people read it” lol.
i’ll remember him as a great straight man in “what’s up doc?” & quite good in “paper moon.”
I’ve read that Ryan flat-out socked Tatum O’Neal, who was like, eleven, in the face when he didn’t get the Oscar for “Paper Moon.” Do I have that right? I remember it struck me as almost comically villainous.
He tried to pick up Tatum at Farah Fawcett’s funeral.He didn’t recognize his own daughter, and I guess the mourning period for his wife was over once she was in the ground, so he tried to hit it.
Whatta guy. I guess he’d seen “Hamlet” a few times.
What’s Up Doc actually ends with O’Neal himself mocking the signature line of Love Story, saying it’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. And that was just two years later, to give an idea of how quickly the movie evolved from beloved romantic classic to campy mess.
What’s Up, Doc? is straight up one of the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. Like Mel Brooks-level hilarious.
Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor — he is equal to all now.
I remember him best in an old Walter Hill joint: The DriverHe said maybe 100 words in the entire movie, through clenched-teeth menace that just radiated criminal badass.
Captain Stubing’s little known sleazy criminal past.Eventually, he had to hop a ship and hide at sea.
Great movie, I think it’s his best. So much better than fast & furious and it’s ilk.
“You can’t buy silence, you can only rent it. So if somebody has something on you, they’re always going to have it. So the cost has no ceiling and the fear has no end. That’s why some knowledge, some information, is like a terminal disease. It’s … contagious. And it’s fatal.”
Shit yeah, came here to remember him in the Zero Effect and am not disappointed.
THANK YOU FOR THE ZERO EFFECT REFERENCE.Really, AV Club? No mention of this masterpiece?
Really, AV Club? No mention of this masterpiece? I was a bit surprised by the omission of Zero Effect too. It is fantastic (rewatched it a few months ago and it holds up like crazy)… But I don’t think it was ever that well-known, was it? Not that that’s an excuse to not mention it. Ryan O’Neal did some fine work in some fine movies: Paper Moon, What’s Up Doc (despite my ambivalence toward Streisand I can never not watch that when it turns up on TCM or wherever) and Nickelodeon (one of my favorites of all time, no one else seems to like it, sue me). The Thief Who Came to Dinner was fun (O’Neal vs. Warren Oates with Jacqueline Bissett in the middle, how could it not be?) The Driver was, as I recall, really good and he was really good in it – haven’t seen it in decades but I’m sure I’m right. He did some not-great work in some not-great movies, but he could surprise (he’s quite good in A Bridge Too Far where his casting might initially seem odd).
It’s not Ryan O’Neal’s, but this DZ line has stuck with me:“Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you’re only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good.”I really like that movie, late 90s fashions and all.
He was down with the bi*ches and hoes though
Shrug.
He doesn’t talk to any of his kids except for Redmond, whom he visits in
jail. “I was in touch with them for years, and I was a mess,” he says
of the others. “I’m not in touch with them now, and I’ve never been
happier.” When asked if he’s sorry he had children, he nods, Bennetts
reports. “A couple of them I would take back,” he says.