On Dec. 8, 2023, a chapter in the story of one of Hollywood’s most publicly contentious families came to a tragic end with the death of Ryan O’Neal.
Born the son of novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Charles O’Neal on April 20, 1941, Ryan didn’t take long to make a mark on show business. Following progressively bigger roles on television in the 1960s, O’Neal became a star thanks to Peyton’s Place, the soap opera that saw him playing Rodney Harrington alongside future legends like Leslie Nielsen and Mia Farrow.
Major motion pictures followed in the following decade, with one of his very first big screen at-bats paying remarkable professional dividends: 1970’s Love Story earned O’Neal an Oscar nod and, thanks to its borderline unbelievable box office success, more or less wrote the 29-year-old a ticket to whatever jobs he wanted moving forward. A trio of Peter Bogdanovich pictures – What’s Up, Doc?, Nickelodeon, and Paper Moon, made the young actor seem like a sure thing. Sadly, high-profile misfires like Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and the 1978 Love Story follow-up, Oliver’s Story, proved that the idea was flawed.
Meanwhile, O’Neal had struggles of his own. It’s difficult to find a source on the actor that doesn’t use the word “volatility” – he was arrested for brawling at 18, described in terms of “temper” and “reactivity” by his second wife, and was accused of physical abuse by Anjelica Huston in her 2014 memoir Watch Me. His struggles with substance abuse were public and well-documented, with a drug charge arrest alongside his son in 2007 seemingly ending whatever cultural goodwill he had left, though a 2021 induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame kept him in the public eye.
There were also other health issues. In 2001, at age 60, O’Neal was diagnosed with myelogenous leukemia, but went into remission, with reps referring to the condition as “treatable.” 11 years later, a stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis – then, remarkably, more remission the following year.
O’Neal’s passing more than a decade after his last public bout with cancer was announced by his son, Patrick O’Neal, via social media.
So far, no mention has been made of whether the Academy Award nominee’s previous diagnoses factored into his death at 82 years old. There’s been no official word on a cause of death from his children, representatives of O’Neal or his estate.
