Ryan O'Neal took $25,000 for Love Story instead of five times that
A Jerry Lewis comedy offered Ryan O'Neal five times the money, but he chose Love Story for $25,000. It made him a star and an Oscar nominee. He resented never getting a share of its profits, and later said a year in Stanley Kubrick's hands on Barry Lyndon did lasting damage to his career.
A Los Angeles native, O'Neal arrived on April 20, 1941, the son of the actress Patricia O'Callaghan and the writer Charles O'Neal, and died on December 8, 2023. At University High School he trained as a Golden Gloves boxer. When his father took a writing job on a television series in the late 1950s the family moved to Munich, and because Ryan was doing badly at school his mother found him work as a stand-in on Tales of the Vikings, which was filming nearby. Working there as an extra and stuntman gave him the acting bug.
Back in America he began with a 1960 guest spot on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and a string of westerns and sitcoms. The breakthrough came in 1964, when the evening soap Peyton Place hired him to play Rodney Harrington; he joked that the studio wanted a young Doug McClure. The show turned its cast into household names, and O'Neal was eager to move into films.
Erich Segal, who had co-written O'Neal's film The Games, recommended him for Love Story after actors including Jon Voight passed. Studio chief Robert Evans said 14 others were tested and none measured up. The hit was followed by What's Up, Doc? with Barbra Streisand, the third-biggest earner of 1972, and Paper Moon, opposite his daughter Tatum, after which cinema owners voted him the second most popular star of 1973, behind only Clint Eastwood.
Barry Lyndon then swallowed more than a year. Despite seven Oscar nominations it disappointed at the box office, earned him a mocking Harvard Lampoon worst-actor award, and in 1985 he complained that Kubrick had remade the picture in the edit. Later choices were mixed: playing General James Gavin in A Bridge Too Far drew criticism, though he noted he did his own parachute jump; Walter Hill called The Driver his finest work; and The Main Event, a boxing comedy with Streisand, paid $1 million plus profits. From 2006 to 2017 he played Max, the heroine's father, on Bones.
Source: Ryan O'Neal
