Ryan o’neal

Born on April 20, 1941, Charles Patrick Ryan O’Neal from Los Angeles comes from a family linked to the cinema, as he is the son of screenwriter Charles O’Neal ( Montana ) and occasional actress Patricia Callaghan ( Three Are Back ). Despite this family background, and the fact that his little brother Kevin would also be an actor, young Ryan directed his steps to boxing, a sport in which he was promising, since his winning statistics were quite good. .

When he decided to try his luck in acting, luck was not on his side. She took refuge for a long time in the series, where she played occasional secondary characters. Only after 9 years of activity, he managed to be given the main role of La perversa , a discreet adaptation of a novel by Elmore Leonard , where he was a poor devil who plans with his lover to rob the safe of the motel where he works .

It was a huge success, so he was cast in the sports drama Proof of Courage , and was later recruited as the lead in Love Story . There, he played his most remembered character, the student from a wealthy family Oliver Barrett IV. In love with outgoing music student Jennifer Cavilleri ( Ali MacGraw ), he decides to marry her against her father’s will.

It brought tears to its eyes in part thanks to Francis Lai ‘s evocative theme song , and became one of the biggest movie hits of all time. The golden age of the actor began, who then starred with William Holden in the atypical and very interesting western by Blake Edwards Two Men Against the West .

He emulated Cary Grant himself in What’s wrong with me, doctor? , by Peter Bogdanovich , an undisguised homage to the film starring the classic actor La fiera de mi niña . O’Neal plays the diffident Howard Banister (who is named Howard after the director of the original film, the great Howard Hawks ), who goes with his fiancée to a musicology convention to raise funds for his research. But then he meets the wild and uninhibited Judy Maxwell ( Barbra Streisand ).), which will turn your life into real chaos. Without reaching the level of the original, the film is saved by its gags along the lines of the screwball comedy of the 30s, and by the amusing O’Neal-Streisand contrast.

O’Neal’s private life has been quite eventful. She has had multiple romances with movie personalities like Anjelica Huston . In 1963 he married Joanna Moore , an actress with titles such as Hindenburg , with whom he had two children, one of whom was the famous Tatum O’Neal. With Leigh Taylor-Young (his co-star in The Wicked), he had another child. And he has a fourth offspring with his most popular partner, the legendary Farrah Fawcett, who passed away from cancer in 2009.

After playing a technician who decides to steal jewelry in The Thief Who Came to Dinner , Ryan O’Neal returned to Bogdanovich’s orders in Paper Moon , where he was a trickster who takes care of a daughter who didn’t know she was I had, at the time of the Great Depression. The girl was played by her real-life daughter, debutante Tatum O’Neal , who after winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress at age 9, became the youngest person to win the award.

The great teacher Stanley Kubrick bet on him as the protagonist of Barry Lyndon , where he was an Irish adventurer of the eighteenth century. Shot in natural light, except for indoors where Kubrick relied on candlelight, the film is simply perfect, and O’Neal thoroughly worked on his character’s Irish accent.

O’Neal ended the ’70s with the right How Hollywood Began , A Bridge Too Far and Driver , but his decline began when roles began to slip. It was going to be Rocky , but the screenwriter, Sylvester Stallone , demanded to be the lead himself, and he made history. He was going to play Michael Corleone in The Godfather , but Coppola decided to go with Al Pacino instead .

In a moment of professional decline, O’Neal agreed to reprise the character of Oliver Barrett IV, in Oliver’s Story , a run-down sequel to Love Story . In the 80s he accumulated mediocre titles such as the adventure film Green Ice , the police comedy Something More Than Colleagues , the light Irreconcilable Differences , the failed Tough Men Don’t Dance , with which Norman Mailer adapted his own and much superior novel, the little memorable comedy Heaven was wrong … The audience progressively forgot about him.

In recent years, O’Neal has grabbed headlines for various somewhat tragic episodes. When his daughter Griffin was 14, he punched her and knocked out her teeth. Later the boy was tried because he was driving the boat that suffered an accident in which Gio, a son of Francis Ford Coppola , died . Griffin couldn’t see that he was trying to navigate between two tied ships, and his companion was decapitated. Griffin also reportedly had drug problems, and O’Neal was arrested for shooting him at his home. The actor was arrested again with another son, Redmond – whose mother was Farrah Fawcett -.

To add insult to injury, Ryan O’Neal was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001, but luckily he ended up winning the battle and recovering. In recent times he has been lavished on shows like Desperate Housewives and Bones .