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He had the face of a fairy-tale lead, the kind that would have fit agreeably in an earlier Hollywood era but felt comfortingly alluring in the moment. Ryan O\u2019Neal<\/a> was a boxer in his youth \u2014 announcing his father had died on Friday, his son Patrick O\u2019Neal pointed fans toward YouTube footage<\/a> of O\u2019Neal fighting Joe Frazier on national TV, with Muhammad Ali doing commentary. But when he migrated to acting, it suited him, and by 1964 he had become a star thanks to the ABC prime-time soap opera \u201cPeyton Place.\u201d<\/p>\n No wonder: O\u2019Neal\u2019s youthful looks, blond and round-cheeked and just a little brainy, remind you of the guy who sat next to you in A.P. bio and who would lend you a pen, or his lunch, if you needed it. It seemed, emphatically, to be the face of a good guy, the kind you definitely wanted to bring home to your parents. When O\u2019Neal tested for the role of Oliver in \u201cLove Story,\u201d Ali MacGraw persuaded her husband, Robert Evans, the executive in charge at Paramount, to cast him.<\/p>\n As the boyish Harvard hockey player in love with Jenny, the whip-smart Radcliffe student, O\u2019Neal was entrancing, and the pair had instant chemistry. \u201cShe had to go home to him at night, but I had her during the day,\u201d O\u2019Neal told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview<\/a> many decades later. Their meet-cute in the movie<\/a>, if you want to call it that, was sexy in a cerebral way, the pair sparring over a library checkout counter, then over coffee, where Jenny informs him that she asked him out because \u201cI like your body.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The movie, released in 1970, was a resounding success, in part because the sharp wit of its beginning gives way to star-crossed melancholy by the end, with Jenny dying of a terminal disease and Oliver stricken with grief, repeating a phrase from his lost sweetheart: \u201cLove means never having to say you\u2019re sorry.\u201d It proved irresistible to audiences, and its success was, in part, what allowed Evans to make movies like \u201cThe Godfather\u201d at Paramount later in the decade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n O\u2019Neal would take that mix of innocence and wit, comfort and humor into his next movie and beyond. It turns out he could do screwball comedy, too. The meet-cute in Peter Bogdanovich\u2019s \u201cWhat\u2019s Up, Doc?<\/a>\u201d featured O\u2019Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister, a musicologist in dark-rimmed glasses, stumbling by accident into an erudite conversation about rocks with the chaotic Judy Maxwell, played by Barbra Streisand. He patronizes her, assuming she doesn\u2019t know a thing about rocks, but his look of surprise at Judy\u2019s proclamation that \u201cI relate primarily to micas, quartz, feldspar\u201d breaks across his face less as wounded ego than as genuine pleasure. By the time he\u2019s fallen backward, landing on his rear as a cascade of nearby stuffed animals falls on his head, we\u2019re in love, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n O\u2019Neal\u2019s life and career were long and storied and not without controversies, among them his difficult relationship with his daughter, Tatum O\u2019Neal, who made her big-screen debut at 9 alongside her father in Bogdanovich\u2019s \u201cPaper Moon.\u201d But one look at his Instagram account<\/a> offers evidence that he believed his love story of a lifetime<\/a> was with Farrah Fawcett.<\/p>\n Fawcett and O\u2019Neal had their own strange sort of meet-cute. Fawcett\u2019s husband, Lee Majors, introduced her to O\u2019Neal in 1979, and the pair were soon romantically involved, though Majors and Fawcett didn\u2019t divorce until 1982. O\u2019Neal had also been married twice, to Joanna Moore and Leigh Taylor-Young, fathering three children, and had a fourth with Fawcett.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He and Fawcett stayed entwined for nearly 20 years. (She left in 1997, when she found him in bed with another woman.) They were reunited again from 2001, when O\u2019Neal learned he had cancer, until Fawcett\u2019s death in 2009. Not exactly a classic fairy tale. It was a rocky partnership, with both Tatum and Fawcett making accusations of physical abuse and fraught relationships with several of his children. But when Fawcett died of cancer \u2014 like Jenny in \u201cLove Story\u201d \u2014 it was hard to miss the parallels. Here was the star of \u201cLove Story,\u201d living the tragedy that had made him a star in the first place. Melodrama becomes reality.<\/p>\n The famous line from \u201cLove Story\u201d \u2014 that \u201clove means never having to say you\u2019re sorry\u201d \u2014 plays well in a swoony tear-jerker, but doesn\u2019t hold up so well in the light of day. Love does mean saying you\u2019re sorry, over and over again, wisdom O\u2019Neal eventually learned, at least on some level. Earlier this year, his daughter spoke<\/a> of trying to reconcile with her father, with whom she subsequently reconnected, posting a picture of them<\/a> on Instagram on April 21, his 82nd birthday, with the caption \u201cHappy birthday dad I love you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s Up, Doc?\u201d concludes with Judy repeating the line about never saying you\u2019re sorry, a little joke within the joke. And Howard, with O\u2019Neal\u2019s easy smile, smitten with her, proclaims, \u201cThat\u2019s the dumbest thing I ever heard.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n