Tatum O’Neal and the horrible backstory behind the youngest ever Oscar win

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For many actors, an Academy Award is the last frontier. They are sometimes handled as issues to be earned by way of years of glad-handing and arduous graft – a prize to be yearned after for years, even a long time. But not everyone has to attend a lifetime. Just ask Tatum O’Neal.

It was 50 years in the past, in 1974, that O’Neal turned the youngest ever Oscar winner, for her efficiency reverse her father Ryan in Peter Bogdanovich’s scammers-on-the-road film Paper Moon. O’Neal was simply eight when she shot the movie, and 10 when she received the award. Despite some claims of so-called class fraud – many have argued that O’Neal should have competed in the Lead Actress strand – this was a win that has stood the take a look at of time. The black-and-white Depression-era drama stays certainly one of the most esteemed American movies of the Seventies, and remains to be, to today, inimitably charming. Paper Moon soared because of O’Neal: the younger actor delivers the quintessential “Hollywood child actor” efficiency, filled with pluck and pathos. Her chemistry along with her father, too, was lived-in and heartfelt. Offscreen, nonetheless, it was a unique story.

The daughter of Ryan and the actor Joanna Moore, O’Neal endured a childhood filled with parental neglect and outright abuse. “You’d think an Oscar nomination would be an indelible moment, a victory to cherish and savour for a lifetime,” she wrote in her 2004 memoir A Paper Life. “But for me it must have been a trauma instead of a triumph.” O’Neal described her father’s “deep resentment” over the acclaim she acquired, supposedly at his expense. By the time awards season swung round, his jealousy was “out of control”, she claimed.

There had been exacerbating components. Ryan, the late star of Love Story and Bogdanovich’s screwball comedy What’s Up Doc?, was in the throes of a drug downside. “Once so loving and funny, he had grown crazily moody,” O’Neal later recalled. He would allegedly inform her: “I just don’t like you, Tatum.”

O’Neal says she has no reminiscence of the nominations announcement, although was informed by another person current that her father had “socked” her upon discovering out that she was nominated and he was not. (Paper Moon did obtain three different nominations, together with one for Madeline Kahn, who went up towards O’Neal in the Supporting Actress class.) Explaining her lack of ability to recollect the incident, O’Neal heartbreakingly wrote: “For a child already obsessed with losing her father, who was living in terror, believing that his love was ebbing away, that would have been way too painful to process. If I’ve blocked it out, it’s no wonder.”

At the time of the nominations, O’Neal and her father had been staying in England, whereas he was filming his lead function in Stanley Kubrick’s interval masterpiece Barry Lyndon. Amid the announcement, Ryan vented his frustrations to the media, telling British reporters that his daughter was “lazy by nature” and had “taken over the picture”. When she went again to the US for Oscar evening, he didn’t accompany her.

“Returning to the States for the ceremony – alone, shaky and sad – I felt like Little Orphan Annie,” O’Neal later wrote, remembering the evening itself with some misgivings (“I must have looked very vulnerable and small”). To onlookers, nonetheless, the scene was a fairytale. At the  Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar evening, O’Neal was cute and innocent-seeming, suited in a customized tuxedo (in imitation of Bianca Jagger, the mannequin and spouse of Mick Jagger with whom her father was having an affair at the time).

She was up towards one other baby actor for the award, The Exorcist’s 15-year-old Linda Blair, in addition to her co-star Kahn, American Grafitti’s Candy Clark and Sylvia Sidney of Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams. When O’Neal went as much as settle for the trophy, she hadn’t ready a speech; she ended up saying only one phrase: “All I really want to thank is my director, Peter Bogdanovich, and my father. Thank you.” Her grandfather then got here on stage, shortly thanked folks on her behalf once more, and escorted her off.

If you watch O’Neal’s speech again, you could choose up on a type of faux-British diction to it – a results of her spending a lot time with Kubrick, and his daughter, Vivian Kubrick, again in England. “I was actually living with the Kubricks at the time. I just loved the way Vivian spoke my name – ‘Tay-tum.’ I wanted to pick up the accent,” the actor revealed to The Hollywood Reporter a decade in the past.

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After the ceremony, she acquired an uncharacteristically affirming telephone name from her father, who went on to show the statuette on his mantle. “It was as if he suddenly saw there was cache in having an Academy Award-winning daughter,” O’Neal mentioned, including that he would normally search to take credit score for the victory.

Her reflections on the Oscar win are profoundly unhappy, together with the declare that the achievement failed to impress any “fanfare from anyone who mattered to me… The feeling I associate most with winning the Oscar is an overwhelming sadness at being abandoned by my parents – both of them, for my mother remained silent – one more time,” she wrote.

The years that adopted the Oscar win had been bleak and chaotic, marked by extra parental abuse and neglect. (This is all per O’Neal’s account of issues; Ryan described the many allegations of abuse in his daughter’s e book as “malicious lies”.) O’Neal confronted unconscionable hardships each earlier than and after her success. She was sexually abused by different adults as a toddler, and tried to take her personal life thrice. She and her brother Griffin developed severe dependancy problems with their very own. To date, her profession has by no means once more reached the heights of Paper Moon.

One notorious low point saw Ryan make a pass at his daughter while at the funeral of his longtime partner, Charlie’s Angels actor Farah Fawcett. O’Neal had been estranged from her father at the time, and he mentioned he didn’t recognise her. Subsequently, although, the pair had been in a position to restore their relationship. In 2020, O’Neal overdosed and suffered a significant stroke, almost dying. Ryan died in December 2023 of congestive coronary heart failure.

It’s totally doable that O’Neal’s report will stand unbroken for an additional 50 years. There have been youthful nominees earlier than and after – Skippy’s nine-year-old Jackie Cooper in 1931; Justin Henry, eight, in 1978’s Kramer vs Kramer; nine-year-old Quevenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild – however no winners. (Only two different youngsters, in truth, have ever received: Anna Paquin, 11, for The Piano, and Patty Duke, 16, for The Miracle Worker.) It’s straightforward to neglect, amid the tragedy, injustice, and brutal horror of her life, the sheer magic that O’Neal was in a position to forged on display screen. Despite all the things, Paper Moon does endure as a celebration of a kid’s prodigious expertise. But nothing may probably have been price the value.