A $25,000 gamble on a weepy romance made him the biggest star in America, and he spent the next fifty years proving he couldn't handle it.
At a glance
- Known for
- Oliver Barrett IV in Love Story, co-starring with daughter Tatum in Paper Moon
- Before fame
- Golden Gloves boxer with a record of 18 wins and 13 knockouts
- Off-screen
- Thirty-year on-and-off relationship with Farrah Fawcett, two cancer diagnoses beaten
Rise to Fame
A $25,000 payday for a role nobody wanted turned into the highest-grossing film of 1970. Love Story grossed $106 million against a $2.2 million budget, spent 15 weeks at number one, and put a line in the American lexicon. Five years on Peyton Place was his resume; the film made him the second-most-bankable star in the country, behind only Clint Eastwood.
The hot streak was real but short. What's Up, Doc? opposite Barbra Streisand became the third-biggest film of 1972. Paper Moon put his nine-year-old daughter Tatum opposite him, and she walked away with the Oscar, the youngest competitive winner in Academy history at ten. Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon earned seven Oscar nominations but tanked commercially. He said his career never recovered from it.
In the Spotlight
The decline was slow and total. His 1980s output was forgettable; he was done as a leading man. The late-career work was modest: a recurring role on Bones for eleven years, a national tour of Love Letters with Ali MacGraw, and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2021 placed next to Fawcett's.
What defined his later decades wasn't the work. It was the wreckage. Tatum's 2004 memoir A Paper Life described drug use, violence, and abuse. He was estranged from her for roughly 20 years. In 2007, an altercation with son Griffin involved a fireplace poker and a gun fired into the air. He and son Redmond were arrested for drug possession in 2008. He hit on his own daughter at Fawcett's funeral in 2009, not recognizing her. His will cut Tatum out entirely. She called it blood money.
Side Notes
The boxing came first. His father built him a ring at seven, and by high school he was competing in Golden Gloves championships with 13 knockouts. Acting only happened because his family moved to Germany for his father's Radio Free Europe job and someone put him on a TV set as a stand-in.
He beat chronic myelogenous leukemia in 2001 and prostate cancer in 2012. He survived two cancers and a thirty-year relationship with Fawcett that was, by all accounts, as volatile as everything else in his life. He won an $18 million Warhol portrait of Fawcett in a lawsuit against the University of Texas in 2013.
Final Chapter
Son Patrick O'Neal announced his death, saying he passed peacefully with his team by his side. Barbra Streisand posted a tribute calling him "funny and charming." The Warhol portrait of Fawcett he'd fought to keep was auctioned by his estate in November 2024 for $1.5 million, a fraction of its estimated $21-24 million value.