Patrick Ryan O’Neal, famous throughout the world for the melodrama “Love Story” and the great historical fresco of “Barry Lyndon” died yesterday at 82 years old in Los Angeles, where he was born in 1941: he made him I notice his son on Instagram.
At the beginning he was the typical representative of the American way of life, handsome and sporty, muscular, hyper-vitaminized, so much so that he was the stuntman of famous stars before becoming one himself, achieving his first success in the scabrous series of “Peyton’s Sinners”. ” (1964-68). But it is the reduction of Erich Segal’s best seller “Love Story” by Arthur Hiller that, making millions of tears shed all over the world, gives him popularity in the role of the rich student who loves and suffers for Ali McGraw, who is instead poor and dies of leukemia, which will then be followed by a bloodless encore, “Oliver’s story”, to box office acclaim.
O’Neal shows talent in these pathetic stories, using his good-guy side, but even more so when he is used in the brilliant register as the dork of the moment and is irresistible in “Does Daddy Send You Alone?” by Bogdanovich with Streisand, and immediately after with the same director he is a vintage Bible salesman in “Paper moon” in which his partner is his child daughter Tatum, who “steals” the film from him and will win the Oscar for supporting role , and with whom he will then become a filial couple again in “Old America”.
In 1975 he got his big break, he was chosen by Stanley Kubrick for “Barry Lyndon” in the role of a climbing soldier in 18th century Ireland, from Thackeray’s novel. A sublime film of direction, of lights, of times in which history becomes a breath of eternity and Ryan plays the proletarian game very well among the nobles. The hunted robber in “Driver” in 1978 is a completely different story, as his career begins to decline. The physical form acquires many sizes more, with his famous wife Farah Fawcett Majors he makes a couple argue heavily and in the meantime he films “A strange case” and with our Mariangela Melato “Jeans with pink eyes” by a Bergman who is not Ingmar but Andrew.
In his career he has touched many genres, including a beautiful twilight western by Blake Edwards with William Holden, “Wild Men”, but the 90s were already the crisis. Surely people will remember him for the unhappy love of “Love Story”, cinephiles for Kubrick’s candlelight masterpiece that recreates a world and a century, while a large audience will love him for the sophisticated comedies with Streisand of a lover of old US cinema like Bogdanovich.
2023-12-08 23:24:14
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