With the career of Ryan O’Neal having tailed off dramatically in recent decades it was his films of the 1970’s where he really established himself as a star
Born 20th April 1941 in Los Angeles to a novelist and screenwriter father and stage actress mother. His future behaviour could perhaps be predicted by his early interest in boxing and he became an amateur boxer and led him to work briefly as a stuntman on TV series in Munich. But his increasingly rowdy behaviour saw him prisoned in 1960 for 50 days for assault at a party he attended. That same year saw him in his first screen role in an episode of the TV series The Untouchables that his father had written.
The following nine years saw him in regular TV roles but none more important than when he made the ladies swoon for five seasons from 1964 – 1969 when he starred as Rodney Harrington on more than 500 episodes on the hit Peyton Place the 1964-69 serialized ABC melodrama spawned by the Lana Turner movie.
Before he started on Peyton Place he had married Joanne Moore in 1963 where they had a son and daughter Griffin and Tatum before the couple divorced in 1967.
His film debut was in 1969’s The Big Bounce where he played the teenage lover to Leigh Taylor-Young, his co-star in Peyton Place who he had married in 1967 and had a son Patrick.
His next film would be The Games for Michael Winner and written by Eric Segal whose best-selling novel ‘Love Story’ would be adapted in to a film with Ryan O’Neal as the lead and would make him a star and earn him his first (and only) Oscar nomination. It was the first of a string of very good films that he would make in the 1970’s. Those films would be the excellent screwball comedy ‘What’s Up Doc?’ with Barbra Streisand and directed by the late Peter Bogdanovich. He would then appear in ‘Paper Moon’ opposite his daughter Tatum. Nine years old at the time of shooting she would steal his thunder by winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. But it was now that his unsavoury legacy fraught personal relationships and abuse allegations would start to come to the fore. Rumoured to have hit her in what was regarded as a fit of jealousy he would turn his temper on his son Griffin. In 2007, O’Neal was arrested for shooting a firearm at Griffin, though he claimed it had been in self-defence, and the charges were eventually dropped. More concerning and unsavoury was an incident at the funeral of Farrah Fawcett in 2009 where he made a romantic advance towards Tatum not recognising his long time estranged daughter.
1975 saw Ryan O’Neal cast as the lead in Stanley Kubrick’s excellent but under rated Barry Lyndon a lavish recreation of Thackeray’s novel that set a new standard for lighting with lenses built to shoot the many scenes lit only by candle. The film was a critical and commercial failure as was 1976’s ‘Nickolodeon’ and 1977’s all star epic ‘A Bridge Too Far’ from director Richard Attenborough. The film was a success but O Neal was overlooked and an attempt to change his image saw him star in Walter Hill’s ‘The Driver’ which, though it was well regarded, fared poorly at the box office. It saw him return to his role from Love Story with the 1978 sequel ‘Oliver’s Story’ and he reteamed with Barbra Streisand in The Main Event. Neither were a success.
After this the 1980’s saw him in a variety of films none of which restored his star status and he returned to TV alongside Farrah Fawcett who he had started up a relationship in 1979 after her then husband Lee Majors had introduced them asking O’Neal to look after her whilst he was away filming. The pair had a son Redmond. O Neal and Fawcett’s relationship would be a rocky one. Constantly on and off and their TV series Good Sports had been a disaster putting a strain on them and they finally parted in 1999 only to reunite in 2001 until her death in 2009
O Neal’s star was now firmly on the wane and his reputation for abusive relationships and his drug addiction saw producers avoid him. The 2007 firearms incident with Griffin didn’t help and 2008 saw him arrested for possession of drugs. 2012 saw him diagnosed with prostate cancer having only just recovered from leukemia
By now his appearances were infrequent. A TV series ’Bones’ was his last on screen work which ended in 2017 although he had made a brief return to film with a small role in Terrance Malick’s 2015 film ‘Knight of Cups’
Ryan O’Neal died aged 82 years old
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