Actor Ryan O’Neal has passed away at age 82, his son, Patrick O’Neal, confirmed Friday.
“So this is the toughest thing I’ve ever had to say but here we go. My dad passed away peacefully today, with his loving team by his side supporting him and loving him as he would us,” his son wrote.
The Oscar-nominated actor of Love Story, who also made appearances in Paper Moon and Barry Lyndon, was famous for his decades-long relationship with Charlie’s Angels actress Farrah Fawcett.
ADVERTISEMENT
O'Neal starred alongside Barbra Streisand in What’s Up Doc? and The Main Event and teamed up with his 9-year-old daughter, Tatum O’Neal, in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 Depression-era film, Paper Moon.
He also played the lead character, a young Irishman who scales the heights of upper class 18th century England, in legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
“My dad was 82, and lived a kick ass life. I hope the first thing he brags about in Heaven is how he sparred 2 rounds with Joe Frazier in 1966, on national TV, with Muhammad Ali doing the commentary, and went toe to toe with Smokin’ Joe,” his son wrote on Instagram.
“Ryan never bragged. But he has bragging rights in Heaven. Especially when it comes to Farrah. Everyone had the poster, he had the real McCoy. And now they meet again. Farrah and Ryan. He has missed her terribly. What an embrace that must be. Together again.”
O’Neal was born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1941 to screenwriter Charles and actress Patricia. Before he broke into acting, O’Neal trained to become a professional boxer, competing in two Golden Gloves championships in Los Angeles in the 1950s.
After hanging up his boxing gloves, he became a stunt man and then an actor, regularly appearing on NBC’s Empire in the early ’60s. His big break came in 1964 with the TV drama Peyton Place, which led to a slew of movie credits, including The Big Bounce, Love Story, What’s Up, Doc?, Barry Lyndon, A Bridge Too Far, and The Main Event.
As his star power rose, so too did his hard-partying reputation and his string of high-profile romances. He was married to Joanna Moore—with whom he shares daughter Tatum and son Griffin—from 1963 to 1967. Later that year, he wed Leigh-Taylor Young, with whom he shares his son Patrick. They divorced in 1971.
It was his on-and-off relationship with Fawcett, however, that garnered the most attention. He and the Charlie’s Angels star were never married but were together for almost 20 years before they separated in 1997. They had one son together, Redmond, in 1985. The two later reunited and were living together when Fawcett died of anal cancer in 2009.
O’Neal had another famously turbulent relationship with his daughter Tatum. In 1973, he and then-10-year-old Tatum starred together in Paper Moon, for which he was Oscar-nominated for Best Actor and she won for Best Supporting Actress. Years later, in 2011, the father-daughter duo reunited on screen for the reality show Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals, in which they tried to repair their relationship, which Tatum says suffered greatly after she won the Oscar for Paper Moon. In interviews, O’Neal had copped to being a bad parent, describing himself as a “hopeless father” in a 2009 Vanity Fair profile. In the same article, Griffin described his dad as “a very abusive, narcissistic psychopath” whose drug abuse caused a years-long rift between him and his three oldest kids; Griffin even claimed that his dad gave him cocaine when he was 11.
Tatum, meanwhile, had written a memoir describing years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father. Earlier this year, however, she told The Hollywood Reporter that she was trying to make amends with him amid his health struggles. She told the outlet, “I think he’s gotten a little bit better in his life. I mean, he’s an amazing man, my dad, and I miss him terribly. ... I love him. I mean, I’ve had a hard life with my dad—but I still love him.”
O’Neal was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001 and prostate cancer in 2012. His final TV credits came on the Fox police procedural Bones, which he regularly appeared on until it wrapped in 2017.
Editor’s note: this article originally stated that Farrah Fawcett died of leukemia but she actually died of anal cancer.
