The late actor’s beauty was used for a string of roles, including Love Story and Paper Moon, but he also displayed a rare comic prowess
Ryan O’Neal, Hollywood actor and star of Love Story, dies aged 82
There were plenty of handsome leading men in the Hollywood of the early 70s: Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Kurt Russell, Burt Reynolds … but none of them were as purely and fascinatingly pretty as Ryan O’Neal, none with that cherubic pertness, complicated with a kind of wounded vulnerability: a pout, a frown, a beguiling flash of femininity to go with the dreamboat male-lead looks, which went hand-in-hand also with something worldly and hard-edged.
It is a great moment in 1973’s The Thief Who Came To Dinner when Ryan O’Neal’s jewel thief coolly inveigles himself into a fancy society soiree and Jacqueline Bisset is taken aback and perhaps even jealous of that brazen, faintly androgynous O’Neal beauty that almost matches her own. “You’re too pretty to be any good,” she says tauntingly. “Any good at what?” he deadpans. “What else is there?” she replies. What indeed?
O’Neal had made the entirety of American womanhood fall devastatingly in love with him with his breakthrough performance in Arthur Hiller’s Love Story in 1970, the heart wrenching date-movie weepie, in which he was the entitled Harvard rich kid falling for the smart, tough girl from the wrong side of the tracks: played by the formidable Ali MacGraw, who is to become terminally ill. Their romantic dynamic had something to do with her being stronger and more assertive than O’Neal’s character, who had been so browbeaten by his wealthy father – but he achieves a kind of nobility and hard won maturity through her sacrifice for him. (At the end of the decade, O’Neal starred in the somewhat anticlimactic sequel Oliver’s Story in which he finds love, of a sort, with Candice Bergen.)
In a sense, O’Neal’s stardom-sponsor at that stage was Robert Evans, the head of Paramount Pictures which produced Love Story – and who was at the time married to Ali MacGraw. But the film-maker who really put O’Neal on the map was the brilliant young director Peter Bogdanovich who cast him in two of his greatest pictures and found in O’Neal exactly the right qualities of insouciant suavity, comedy and romantic adventure.
