Actor Ryan O’Neal, the Oscar-nominated star of “Love Story” who additionally appeared in “Paper Moon” and “Barry Lyndon,” has died, his son mentioned Friday. He was 82.
“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,” Patrick O’Neal wrote on Instagram.
O’Neal, whose smoldering seems and ideal jawline made him the best main man, was additionally recognized for his tumultuous decades-long relationship with actress Farrah Fawcett.
After years of tv roles within the Nineteen Sixties, O’Neal’s large break got here in 1970’s “Love Story,” a field workplace phenomenon that earned him an Oscar nomination — one in all a grab-bag of nods for a movie now credited with turning into a template for the “chick flick” style.
Two years later he was paired with Barbra Streisand for the screwball comedy “What’s Up, Doc?” one other hit with U.S. audiences that additional elevated his profile.
Over the next years, O’Neal performed a jewel thief in “The Thief Who Came To Dinner” and starred reverse his daughter Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 hit “Paper Moon” — bagging a Golden Globe nomination within the course of.
In 1975 he appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” a picaresque historic drama that’s higher thought-of now than it was 5 a long time in the past.
“As a human being, my father was as generous as they come,” Patrick O’Neal wrote. “And the funniest particular person in any room. And probably the most good-looking clearly, but additionally probably the most charming. Lethal combo.
“He loved to make people laugh. It’s pretty much his goal. Didn’t matter the situation, if there was a joke to be found, he nailed it. He really wanted us laughing. And we did all laugh. Every time. We had fun. Fun in the sun.”
O’Neal was married and divorced twice earlier than he started a stormy, however enduring, relationship with “Charlie’s Angels” star Fawcett.
The couple had been collectively for nearly 20 years from the late Nineteen Seventies, however cut up in 1997 reportedly after she caught him in flagrante with one other actress.
They reunited in 2001 till her loss of life on the age of 62 in 2009.
O’Neal advised British journalist Piers Morgan that watching “Love Story” — by which a wealthy child falls in love with a working class lady who later dies — was upsetting.
“I lost Farrah to cancer, and I just wonder (why) that played out that way for me,” he mentioned. “One was just a big deal and so successful, and then in real life it was just the opposite, a tragedy.”
© 2023 AFP