Ryan O’Neal, Grasp of the Offbeat Meet-Cute

He had the face of a fairy-tale lead, the sort that will have match agreeably in an earlier Hollywood period however felt comfortingly alluring within the second. Ryan O’Neal was a boxer in his youth — saying his father had died on Friday, his son Patrick O’Neal pointed followers towards YouTube footage of O’Neal preventing Joe Frazier on nationwide TV, with Muhammad Ali doing commentary. However when he migrated to performing, it suited him, and by 1964 he had change into a star because of the ABC prime-time cleaning soap opera “Peyton Place.”

No surprise: O’Neal’s youthful seems to be, blond and round-cheeked and just a bit brainy, remind you of the man who sat subsequent to you in A.P. bio and who would lend you a pen, or his lunch, if you happen to wanted it. It appeared, emphatically, to be the face of an excellent man, the sort you undoubtedly needed to carry house to your dad and mom. When O’Neal examined for the position of Oliver in “Love Story,” Ali MacGraw persuaded her husband, Robert Evans, the chief in cost at Paramount, to forged him.

Because the boyish Harvard hockey participant in love with Jenny, the whip-smart Radcliffe scholar, O’Neal was entrancing, and the pair had prompt chemistry. “She needed to go house to him at evening, however I had her in the course of the day,” O’Neal informed The Hollywood Reporter in an interview many many years later. Their meet-cute in the movie, if you wish to name it that, was horny in a cerebral method, the pair sparring over a library checkout counter, then over espresso, the place Jenny informs him that she requested him out as a result of “I like your physique.”

The film, launched in 1970, was a powerful success, partially as a result of the sharp wit of its starting offers technique to star-crossed melancholy by the top, with Jenny dying of a terminal illness and Oliver stricken with grief, repeating a phrase from his misplaced sweetheart: “Love means by no means having to say you’re sorry.” It proved irresistible to audiences, and its success was, partially, what allowed Evans to make films like “The Godfather” at Paramount later within the decade.

O’Neal would take that blend of innocence and wit, consolation and humor into his subsequent film and past. It seems he may do screwball comedy, too. The meet-cute in Peter Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” featured O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister, a musicologist in dark-rimmed glasses, stumbling by chance into an erudite dialog about rocks with the chaotic Judy Maxwell, performed by Barbra Streisand. He patronizes her, assuming she doesn’t know a factor about rocks, however his look of shock at Judy’s proclamation that “I relate primarily to micas, quartz, feldspar” breaks throughout his face much less as wounded ego than as real pleasure. By the point he’s fallen backward, touchdown on his rear as a cascade of close by stuffed animals falls on his head, we’re in love, too.

O’Neal’s life and profession had been lengthy and storied and never with out controversies, amongst them his tough relationship along with his daughter, Tatum O’Neal, who made her big-screen debut at 9 alongside her father in Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon.” However one have a look at his Instagram account provides proof that he believed his love story of a lifetime was with Farrah Fawcett.

Fawcett and O’Neal had their very own unusual kind of meet-cute. Fawcett’s husband, Lee Majors, launched her to O’Neal in 1979, and the pair had been quickly romantically concerned, although Majors and Fawcett didn’t divorce till 1982. O’Neal had additionally been married twice, to Joanna Moore and Leigh Taylor-Younger, fathering three youngsters, and had a fourth with Fawcett.

He and Fawcett stayed entwined for almost 20 years. (She left in 1997, when she discovered him in mattress with one other girl.) They had been reunited once more from 2001, when O’Neal discovered he had most cancers, till Fawcett’s loss of life in 2009. Not precisely a basic fairy story. It was a rocky partnership, with each Tatum and Fawcett making accusations of bodily abuse and fraught relationships with a number of of his youngsters. However when Fawcett died of most cancers — like Jenny in “Love Story” — it was onerous to overlook the parallels. Right here was the star of “Love Story,” dwelling the tragedy that had made him a star within the first place. Melodrama turns into actuality.

The well-known line from “Love Story” — that “love means by no means having to say you’re sorry” — performs properly in a swoony tear-jerker, however doesn’t maintain up so properly within the mild of day. Love does imply saying you’re sorry, time and again, knowledge O’Neal ultimately discovered, at the least on some degree. Earlier this yr, his daughter spoke of making an attempt to reconcile along with her father, with whom she subsequently reconnected, posting a picture of them on Instagram on April 21, his 82nd birthday, with the caption “Completely happy birthday dad I like you.”

“What’s Up, Doc?” concludes with Judy repeating the road about by no means saying you’re sorry, somewhat joke inside the joke. And Howard, with O’Neal’s straightforward smile, smitten along with her, proclaims, “That’s the dumbest factor I ever heard.”