NEWS / Actor Ryan O’Neal’s cause of death revealed in death certificate

Actor Ryan O’Neal died from congestive heart failure and cardiomyopathy, according to his Los Angeles County death certificate, which was obtained by celebrity news outlet The Blast. The actor passed away at the age of 82 at St. John’s Medical in Los Angeles on December 8, after suffering from cardiomyopathy for years.

“My father Ryan O’Neal has always been my hero,” the actor’s son Patrick O’Neal posted on Instagram on December 8, “I looked up to him and he was always bigger than life. When I was born in 1967 my dad was already a TV star on Peyton Place. That’s where he met my mom Leigh Taylor-Young, and about 9 months later (give or take a date night or two) I was born.”

O’Neal achieved national fame from his role of Rodney Harrington in the ABC soap opera Peyton Place, which ran from 1964 to 1969. In 1970, his name became known worldwide after playing the main role in the tragic romance drama Love Story, in which his character from a rich family falls in love with a working-class girl, played by Ali MacGraw, only to discover that she has terminal cancer. O’Neal got nominated for an Academy Award for his performance and went on to star in multiple movies throughout the 1970s, including Peter Bogdanovich’s comedies What’s Up Doc (1972) and Paper Moon (1973); and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) playing the titular antihero.

He went on to play a US Division Commander in Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1977), set in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II, the stoic titular character in Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), a getaway driver who gets sucked into an illegal sting set up by a crooked cop played by Bruce Dern and whose character served as the prototype to Ryan Gosling’s Driver in Drive (2011) and became the basis for a The Driver video game series.

O’Neal had 4 children—daughter Tatum and son Griffin with his first wife Joanna Moore, son Patrick with his second wife Leigh Taylor-Young, and his youngest son Redmond with actress Farah Fawcett.

The actor’s daughter Tatum O’Neal also expressed sorrow over her father’s passing. “I feel great sorrow with my father’s passing,” she was quoted by People magazine as stating, “He meant the world to me. I loved him very much and know he loved me too. I’ll miss him forever and I feel very lucky that we ended on such good terms.”