Ryan O’Neal: 70’s icon and star of Love Story and Barry Lyndon, dead at 82

Last Updated on December 15, 2023

Another former silver screen icon has passed, with THR reporting that Ryan O’Neal, star of Love Story and Barry Lyndon, has died at 82. While his star had dimmed since his heyday, at the height of his fame, Ryan O’Neal was considered one of the biggest stars in the world. His 1970 classic Love Story, co-starring Ali McGraw, made him one of the decade’s biggest heartthrobs, and he followed it up with a couple of stone-cold classics, including a few movies by Peter Bogdanovich. His first movie with the director, What’s Up Doc, paired him for the first time with Barbra Streisand, with the two reuniting years later for The Main Event – both of which were massive hits. Probably his best movie with Bogdanovich, Paper Moon, paired him with his daughter, Tatum O’Neal, who took home an Oscar for her role in this black-and-white depression-set classic.

Other classic seventies movies O’Neal starred in include Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Walter Hill’s The Driver. His career started to falter towards the end of the seventies after appearing in a few ill-advised films, such as a sequel to Love Story called Oliver’s Story, which no one remembers now. In the early eighties, he always seemed on the verge of a comeback, starring in a few good movies, including the caper film Green Ice and a movie I loved as a kid called Irreconcilable Differences, opposite Drew Barrymore and Shelley Long. He also had the misfortune to appear in one of the most infamous, poorly acted screen moments of all time when he starred in Norman Mailer’s Cannon film, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, where his delivery of the line “oh God, oh man, oh God” might have cost him his career as a leading man. One can’t blame O’Neal for this, with many believing the famously contrary Mailer left it in as a deliberate insult to the producers, his audience and well, everyone else. It currently has 11 million views on YouTube under the title “worst line reading ever”.

Sadly, O’Neal’s personal life began to overshadow his screen work. While he was part of a glamorous couple with Farrah Fawcett, three of his children, Tatum, Griffith and Redmond, all struggled horribly with drugs, and O’Neal’s relationship with them often seemed fraught. He was arrested for a brawl with his son in 2007 when Fawcett was terminally ill (among other incidents too tawdry to repeat here), and his reality show with his daughter, Ryan & Tatum: The O’Neals, was deemed exploitative by some, as were his memoirs of life with Farrah Fawcett after her death.

Alas, in the end, all of O’Neal’s problems won’t be remembered, and it’ll be the movies that live on. With a filmography that includes Love Story, A Bridge Too Far, Barry Lyndon, What’s Up Doc, Paper Moon and The Driver, one can expect his on-screen legacy to last a long time. In the end, who could ask for more?