Tatum O’Neal Reflects on Healing, Heartbreak, and the Complicated Bond with Her Late Father

Home is where the heart is, so former child star Tatum O’Neal was devastated when the former house of her late father, Ryan O’Neal, burned down in the recent L.A. fires.

“It’s the saddest, ever so sad, I could cry,” says Tatum, 61. “My father’s house is gone. Malibu gone.”

Tatum literally lived the best of times and the worst of times under Ryan’s roof. Dad and actress mom Joanna Moore were both addicts, and Tatum was subject to both abuse and neglect at home.

Trouble started when Tatum and Ryan starred in the 1973 classic “Paper Moon” — and while dad wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar, 10-year-old Tatum won Best Supporting Actress and remains the youngest Oscar winner in Academy history.

That made both of her parents jealous. Tatum says her hot-headed father hit her and refused to attend the Oscars with her. “Things got ugly quick,” she remembers. “He loved me, but then hated me, because I won the Academy Award.”

When her parents split, Tatum went with mom — and recalls eating dog food and being beaten by her mother’s teenage boyfriend. Tatum moved in with Ryan, who used drugs in front of her, then his dealer sexually abused her.

By the time she hit her teens, Tatum was using drugs and alcohol and tried to kill herself. “I had already tried to cut my wrists,” she reveals. “I was 13. I had tried to commit suicide twice already.”

Today, she’s working to overcome her childhood scars — and recover from a 2020 overdose on painkillers, opiates and morphine, which resulted in a stroke that left her in a coma for six weeks.

She lost her ability to walk, talk and see, and she continues to attend speech therapy twice a week and is learning how to read again.

Ryan and Tatum attempted to patch up their differences over the years, and she visited him at his Malibu home shortly before he died at age 82 in 2023. “He was like, ‘Here, take a pill,’” Tatum says. “I was like, ‘No, thank you.’” But she did fall off the wagon later that day.

Tatum’s ex-husband, tennis legend John McEnroe, who had three kids with the star during their eight-year marriage, blasts, “Every single time she’s seen her dad my entire life, something happens.”

With her father gone, she’s ready to live as “just Tatum! Without my dad.”