Tatum O’Neal is still recovering from her near-death experience three years ago, when she overdosed on pain medication, opiates and morphine and had a stroke that put her in a coma for six weeks and has left her with lingering aphasia.
The 59-year-old has struggled with sobriety since her teens, growing up in Hollywood and becoming embroiled in a volatile marriage and ongoing estrangement and reconciliation with her father, fellow actor Ryan O’Neal.
“I’ve had a hard hard hard hard hard life,” O’Neal told People in a recent interview about her recovery. “And I rarely cry, but I am crying a lot more lately. But that’s a very good thing for my life in general as I keep going forward in my life.”
At just 10, O’Neal won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in “Paper Moon,” still the youngest actor in history to do so.
Tatum O’Neal remains the youngest actor to earn a competitive Oscar. She earned a win in the best supporting actress category for her role in “Paper Moon” alongside her father Ryan O’Neal. (Getty Images)
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In the film, she plays a young orphan who partners with Ryan’s grifter to swindle people out of money, often pretending to be a father-daughter duo in their cons.
Her career continued after her win, and she starred in films like “The Bad News Bears,” “International Velvet” and “Little Darlings.”
“Paper Moon” featured Tatum O’Neal with her father, Ryan O’Neal. The duo play a pair of grifters in the 1930s. (CBS via Getty Images)
However, behind the scenes, her family life was difficult.
Her father, Ryan, admitted in a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair that his daughter’s Oscar caused tension within the family.
“Everybody hated everybody because of that Academy Award,” he said.
Ryan and Tatum’s mother, Joanna Moore, married in 1963 and later divorced in 1966. Tatum and her brother, Griffin, lived with Moore until 1970, when Moore lost custody of her children after an arrest for drunken driving. Moore had chronic alcohol and drug abuse problems and was arrested for drunken driving multiple times. She died in 1997 from lung cancer.
Tatum and her brother went to live with Ryan after Moore lost custody. In her 2001 autobiography, Tatum alleged she suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, who was also abusing drugs.
According to her 2001 memoir, “A Paper Life,” she contemplated suicide after she allegedly caught her father in bed with Melanie Griffith during a trip to Europe and was later molested by her father’s drug dealer friend.
Ryan and Tatum O’Neal circa 1970. (Michael Ochs Archives)
Ryan denied any of the claims. In the 2009 Vanity Fair profile, Tatum said, “He has every right to be angry about the book; no parent wants to hear their kid saying sh–ty things about them. But what I wrote in the book was true.
“I’ve got a battle with drugs, but I’m a strong, independent person, and I fight for myself, and my father and I butt heads. When I was 16 years old, he and Farrah moved in together. And after that, I saw my dad periodically. And that took a long time for me to get over.”
Ryan allegedly left Tatum and Griffin alone at their home to stay with Farrah Fawcett, with whom he later had one child, Redmond O’Neal.
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Over the years, the father and daughter have made attempts at reconciliation.
In 2011, they appeared together in a docuseries for OWN, Oprah Winfrey’s network, titled “Ryan and Tatum: The O’Neals,” but things remained rocky.
In a 2015 interview with Winfrey, O’Neal said “I did have one psychiatrist, Dr. Beatriz Foster. She’s the only one who told me, when I was about 14, ‘I don’t think your father is a good influence on you.’ I’d never heard that before, even though he’d been hitting me and beating me and head-butting me for years. By the time I hit puberty, Ryan didn’t like me. Period. But he wouldn’t let me go. So, he left me at the beach house [in Malibu] and went off with Farrah [Fawcett]. But I had this funny survival instinct.”
Farrah Fawcett, Ryan O’Neal, Griffin O’Neal and Tatum O’Neal backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in 1980 in Los Angeles. (Brad Elterman/FilmMagic)
Things appear to be better between the father and daughter now.
Her son, Sean McEnroe, shared a photo in late 2020 showing the family together — Tatum, Ryan and all three of her children — Sean, Kevin and Emily — before the world would learn of O’Neal’s overdose and coma.
In the caption, he wrote the last time all of them were together was at an anniversary screening of “Paper Moon” in 2003.
“I could cry tears of gratitude that everyone in this photo is still alive and that we were all able to come together again after so many years of hardship,” he wrote. “The entire West Coast is burning, but if the O’Neals can reconcile, truly anything is possible.”
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In an Instagram post earlier this year, Tatum shared a recent photo of her sitting next to Ryan with her arm around him, wishing him a happy birthday in the caption.
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Her uncertain childhood led Tatum to begin using cocaine at 15.
“I felt like I was worth nothing,” she said at the time.
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She said she was a full-blown addict by age 20. That was also around the time she began dating John McEnroe.
“He was very good looking. I thought he was charming. … It was sort of a chemical attraction or physical attraction, a love at first sight kind of thing,” O’Neal told the outlet in 2004.
John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal at their wedding in 1986. (Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
The couple married shortly after the birth of their first child, Kevin, in 1986, and they had two more together, Sean and Emily.
The marriage lasted until 1994, when the couple divorced after being separated for two years.
O’Neal later alleged McEnroe’s notorious temper extended into the home and claimed he was violent toward her.
“He would take out all of his rage onto me,” she said in the 2004 ABC interview.
McEnroe denied her claims and released his own autobiography, “You Cannot Be Serious,” which included discussions of her drug use.
After the divorce, O’Neal and McEnroe shared custody until she began using heroin and was in and out of rehab centers.
John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal in 1992. (Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)
In 2008, she was arrested for buying drugs near her apartment in Manhattan and was charged with a misdemeanor criminal possession of a controlled substance. She later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and was sentenced to spend two half days in a drug treatment program.
“There’s no good parenting if you’re under the influence of drugs. I knew that,” she reflected in a 2015 New York Times interview.
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McEnroe has been married to singer Patty Smyth since 1997, and though they don’t interact often, Tatum had kind words for the tennis star in a 2020 CBS Sunday Morning interview.
“The happiest times of my life were the times that I was married,” O’Neal said in the interview. “Sometimes we think we’re making the right decision, and maybe we aren’t. And I have to live with that, too.”
In 2015, O’Neal revealed to People she was “dating mostly women recently” but didn’t label her sexuality. “I’m not one or the other,” she said.
Tatum O’Neal revealed in a 2015 interview with People that she was “dating mostly women recently” but wasn’t putting a label on her sexuality. (Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic)
“I think women are the most amazing creatures on earth,” O’Neal added. “They’re gentle and also more intelligent than the men that I’ve met recently. I don’t have a steady right now, but I look forward to it.”
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Tatum O’Neal in 2018. (Getty Images)
Since her overdose and stroke in May 2020, O’Neal has focused on regaining her reading, writing and speech abilities after suffering from aphasia. She noted in her People interview she “can’t really read and write yet” but is taking everything one day at time.
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Sobriety is her other main priority.
“To be sober is the part about going forward not back. I don’t want to drink anymore, I don’t want to use anymore,” she said in a video interview with People. “But I’m doing much better about that, I’m doing so many meetings. I’m impressed with myself about that.
“I’ve been trying to get sober my whole life. Every day, I am trying.”
Fox News Digital’s Lauryn Overhultz contributed to this report.
