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Buzz Feed
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
'70s Child Actors, Then And Now
Sorry if this sounds odd, but I could spend hours looking at old celebrity photos from the good ol' days. And one particular genre of celebs I've become super interested in researching lately are CHILD STARS — specifically, the ones many of us have probably forgotten about. And we've spoken about the more recent child stars who have grown up in the blink of an eye, but what about the ones from several decades ago? You know, the kids who starred in our fave movies and TV shows? Well, we're about find out what they look like now. And some of these are big shockers. First, here is Peter Ostrum from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, age 12: And here he is now, age 67: Here is Jodie Foster from Taxi Driver, age 14: And here she is now, age 62: Here is Linda Blair from The Exorcist, age 16: And here she is now: Here is Tatum O'Neal from Paper Moon and The Bad News Bears, age 14: And here she is now, age 61: Here is Ron Howard from The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, age 9: And here he is now, age 71: Here is Kristy McNichol from Family, age 15: And here she is now, age 62: Here is Henry Thomas from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, age 11: And here he is now, age 53: Here is Kim Richards from Escape to Witch Mountain, age 6: And here she is now, age 60: Here is Megan Follows from Anne of Green Gables, age 14: And here she is now, age 57: Here is Danny Lloyd from The Shining, age 6: And here he is now, age 52: Here is Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family, age 14: And here he is now, age 65: Here is Melissa Gilbert from Little House on the Prairie, age 13: And here she is now, age 61: Here is Todd Bridges from Diff'rent Strokes, age 14: And here he is now, age 59: Here is Angela Cartwright from The Sound of Music and Lost In Space, age 13: And here she is now, age 72: Here is Lisa Whelchel from The Facts of Life, age 16: And here she is now, age 61: Here is Bonnie Langford from Just William, age 13: And here she is now, age 60: Here is Christopher Knight from The Brady Bunch, age 13: Here is Mackenzie Phillips from One Day At A Time and American Graffiti, age 12: Here is Johnny Whitaker from Family Affair and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, age 13: And here he is now, age 65: Here is Harvey Stephens from The Omen, age 5: And here he is now, age 54: Here is Noah Hathaway from Battlestar Galactica, age 5: Who's your favourite child star from the '70s, '80s, or '90s? Tell me in the comments below! And for more celeb content, follow BuzzFeed Canada on Instagram and TikTok!
Economic Times
29-04-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
NYT Mini Crossword answers for April 27, 2025 – Solve today's puzzle quickly with expert tips and clue breakdown
NYT Mini Crossword Answers for April 27, 2025, are here! Solve your puzzle quickly with our easy-to-follow guide featuring all the Across and Down answers. From STOOP for outdoor people-watching to AETNA as the health insurance giant, we've got all the solutions. Whether you're a crossword beginner or expert, this breakdown will help you breeze through. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads What were the across clues and answers in today's NYT Mini Crossword? Outdoor spot to people-watch, maybe: The answer is STOOP. A classic place to sit back and watch the world pass by. Big name in health insurance: It's AETNA. If you're in the U.S., you've probably seen this name on countless insurance forms. Broadway theater helper: We're talking about an USHER, the friendly face guiding you to your seat. Easy to understand: The word we needed here was CLEAR. No tricks there — just plain, simple English! When many show up to a job interview: Think early bird. The answer is EARLY. What were the down clues and answers in today's NYT Mini Crossword? What "salsa" literally means: It's SAUCE. A neat little language tidbit for your next trivia night. Electric car maker since 2003: No surprises here — it's TESLA. Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning before Elon Musk came on board. "... in one ear and out the ___": That's OTHER. A classic phrase for something not quite sticking in our brains! Tatum ___, youngest-ever Oscar winner (at age 10, for Best Supporting Actress): The answer is ONEAL. Tatum O'Neal won for Paper Moon back in 1974. Defensive maneuver in fencing: That would be a PARRY. A quick move to block an opponent's thrust. What were the NYT Mini Crossword answers for yesterday, April 26, 2025? Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Fancy party: GALA Five ___ (discount store chain): BELOW Bottom stripe on a pride flag: PURPLE Bedtime outfit, informally: JAMMIES Task to "run": ERRAND Actress Keaton of "Father of the Bride": DIANE Car ride game: ISPY Country where the automobile, aspirin, and accordion were invented: GERMANY Mountain-related: ALPINE Was audibly amused, slangily: LOLED Really impresses: AWES Unfair reputation: BUM RAP Host of the 2024 Summer Olympics: PARIS "Warrior-monks who keep peace in the universe," per George Lucas: JEDI Why does the NYT Mini Crossword feel harder on Saturdays? What time does the NYT Mini Crossword reset every day? Weekday and Saturday puzzles reset at 10 p.m. EST the night before. Sunday puzzles reset earlier at 6 p.m. EST on Saturday. FAQs: If you've been scratching your head trying to finish the NYT Mini Crossword for April 27, 2025, you're in the right place. Let's walk through today's answers together! Whether you're a long-time crossword fan or just someone who loves a quick brain workout, today's puzzle had its own little NYT Mini, as you probably know, is a 5x5 bite-sized crossword from The New York Times, perfect for squeezing in a fun mental challenge anytime. And lately, they've even made Saturdays a bit more intense, giving us more clues than the typical weekday dose. So if today felt just a bit harder, you weren't imagining it!Today's Across clues brought a nice mix of easy wins and a few that made me pause. Here's a full breakdown:Now for the vertical thinkers among us, here are today's Down clues and answers:In case you missed yesterday's puzzle, here's a quick recap of the answers you needed:If you felt today's Mini was a little more challenging, you're definitely onto something. As per The New York Times, starting in 2024, Saturday puzzles often have more clues than the usual five Across and five Down, making the grid a bit denser and a lot more fun for seasoned solvers. It's a clever way to keep the Mini fresh without making it too a handy reminder if you're planning your solving streaks:So if you like getting an early start (or you're just a night owl like me), you can technically tackle tomorrow's puzzle tonight!Today's answers include, and puzzles often have more clues, making them more challenging.
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Monty Python and the Holy Grail at 50: a hilarious comic peak
It was with some surprise, as I gathered my recollections of Monty Python and the Holy Grail before its 50th anniversary this week, that I realised I had seen it in full only once, back when I and the film were both considerably younger. It felt like more. The first fully narrative feature by Britain's best-loved TV sketch troupe is among the most fondly, frequently and recognisably referenced comedies in all cinema; the film's best scenes are hard to separate from various everyday quotations or pub impressions thereof. Some comedy is made not so much to stand as individual art than to be absorbed into our collective comic language, and so it is with Monty Python, their best work a stew of endlessly imitable idioms and accents, to be relished with or without context. In all truth, I remembered laughing at Monty Python and the Holy Grail more vividly than I remembered exactly what I was laughing at. For this I must blame my late father, whose laughter – loud and barking, often a beat ahead of lines already known and eagerly anticipated – I perhaps recall more vividly than my own. The film was one of a jumbled canon of comedies that, over the course of my childhood, he eagerly presented to my brother and I as apices of the form, with hit-and-miss results. (Paper Moon? Wholly shared joy. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines? He chuckled alone.) Monty Python and the Holy Grail was among the hits: some giggling fits are too giddy not to catch on. Watching it a second time, on my own, I probably caught a good deal more of the jokes that were drowned out in my childhood, while others that I did remember – notably the famous running debate about the airspeed of a laden swallow – were more dementedly extended and involved than I might have guessed. The real surprise of this return visit, however, was the remarkable strike rate of the gags. I had expected a scattershot affair of lunatic highs and groan-worthy lows, as tends to be the pattern of sketch comedy, but the film's antic wit is sustained better than its knowingly slipshod narrative and flashes of avant-garde style might suggest. Formally and structurally, the film may have been a chaotically experimental venture for much of the Python team – not least first-time feature directors Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones – but minute-to-minute jokes? No uncertainty there. It could all have gone terribly wrong, of course. By 1973, when Monty Python and the Holy Grail was conceived, the team's BBC show Monty Python's Flying Circus was three series in and well on its way to a curious kind of status somewhere between cult and national treasure. It was popular enough to have already prompted a 1971 film spinoff that was little more than a greatest-hits compilation. Recreating numerous sketches from the show and stringing them together in an attempt to engage the elusive American market, And Now for Something Completely Different was something of a redundant curio – funny, certainly, but hardly cinematic. If the group were to have a big-screen career, they had to think beyond the short-form work they had already mastered. They had to tell a story. Sort of. Arthurian legend had enjoyed a pop culture revival ripe for spoofing: the chintzy Broadway tunes of Lerner and Loewe's Camelot were still ringing in audiences' ears by the early 70s, while TH White's popular tetralogy The Once and Future King had been given the Disney treatment in The Sword in the Stone a decade prior. Reimagining King Arthur – played with wonderfully queer bluster and defensiveness by the late Graham Chapman – and his Knights of the Round Table as an alternately brutal and ineffectual band of dolts, Gilliam and Jones's film dismantled the macho romanticism of the Matter of Britain in one fell swoop, with a simple running gag that also handily got around the lack of animal-wrangling budget: no horses and just a limp-wristed, lolloping gait and two clopping coconut halves to underline their absence. What is a knight without a steed? About as powerful as a king without a court, both of which apply to poor, hamstrung Arthur here, as he trudges vainly across England in search of who-knows-exactly-what, earning only the contempt of his sceptical, mud-stained subjects ('Just because some watery tart threw a sword at you,' one mutters) and mysteriously invading French adversaries along the way. It's a healthily republican rejoinder to reams of awed Arthurian lore, sneaking some startlingly pithy class commentary in amid the loopy japing. 'I didn't vote for you,' says one unimpressed countryman to our horseless hero. 'You don't vote for kings,' Arthur counters, as if that answer raises no further questions. But if sentimental historical myth-making comes in for a skewering here, so does the drab, earthy severity of the folk-horror wave in 1970s British cinema: extremities of violence and eroticism are here rendered ridiculous, even benign. Gilliam and Jones's film may be a wilfully shaggy affair, delighting in its absurd logical leaps and blunt narrative dead ends, but it's consistent in its undermining of rigid British storytelling traditions – not just with the gleefully vulgar anachronisms of the Carry On films, but with its own kind of gonzo political integrity. Half a century on, the film is palpably a product of its era – visible in its own stylings and those of the contemporary works it responds to – but the Python sensibility remains so strangely, dizzily sui generis that it can't really date all that much either. The team had more ambitious, polished films in their future: Life of Brian still carries an exhilaratingly subversive punch, while The Meaning of Life returned to the fragmented sketch format with a greater sense of perverse philosophical inquiry. Gilliam's own flair for baroque lunacy, meanwhile, would reach artsier highs and grisly lows in his ensuing directorial career. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail remains a pure comic peak for him and the collective alike: a film made to be recited by heart, hilarious even as second-hand evocation, and still possessed of pleasures and surprises that generations of cultists haven't yet spoiled.
New Indian Express
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Surviving Childhood: The Last Picture Show and four other unforgettable 'coming-of-age' films
A popular cinematic genre (whatever that means!) is the 'coming-of-age' film. Most are works of cloying sentimentality steeped in nostalgia. Focused on a young person growing to maturity, it traipses through standard dilemmas. Ordeals are overcome. There is awakening, sexual or otherwise. There are archetypes – the rebel or outsider is favoured as conformists are dull and limit dramatic possibilities. The settings are cliques and milieus centred around schools and communities which set out stereotypical social hierarchies. A few films transcend the strictures of the formula and remain enduring works. Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon ( 1973) stand out amidst the Hollywood dross. Based on a Larry McMurty novel, The Last Picture Show shared the sensibility and evocation of America present in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces ( 1970). Shot in cold black-and-white, it opens with a panning shot from the cinema across a deserted main street while a car drives by. The sound is a car radio playing Hank Williams' " Why Don't You Love Me (Like You Used To Do) ?" The film is a bleak portrait of a dying small town and its inhabitants. It is a collage of lives, some beginning and others near the end, all trapped. At the film's centre are two brothers - Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) who bears the burden of looking after the younger, disabled Billy (Sam Bottoms). Jacy (Cybil Shepherd) is the pretty, glamorous and spoiled daughter of a rich family in a relationship with Sonny's best friend Duane (Jeff Bridges). Her overt sexuality combines desire and calculation which worries her frequently drunk mother (Ellen Burstyn) who fears her daughter will get pregnant and marry young ending up in the same rut she has found herself to be in. Another relationship is the affair between the school coach's wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) and Sonny. Echoing the relationship between Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate , it is impulsive and doomed – an older woman seeking a last chance at happiness and a child who uses her to gain sexual experience without understanding or reciprocating the older woman's feelings. Studied and deliberate (Bogdanovich was a film historian), it is a merciless examination of hope and how it withers away or is thwarted. The Last Picture Show's final scene returns to the empty street where the cinema is now abandoned, a farewell to the town and a way of life. Paper Moon is different. Also filmed in black-and-white (by cinematographer László Kovács), it is about a con man (Ryan O'Neal) and a little girl (O'Neal's real daughter Tatum), a tomboy who might be his illegitimate child. A period piece set in the Great Depression, it uses generic conventions, including from road movies, to show poverty through the eyes of its characters as they swindle their way through the countryside hawking Bibles. Along the way, they pick up a sideshow tart - with the unlikely name Trixie Delight (played with relish by Madeline Kahn). Paper Moon is held together by the performances, especially that of Tatum O'Neal (who became the youngest-ever Oscar winner for her performance) and her transformation into a precocious hustler as she strives to survive in the conditions she finds hereself in. Like The Last Picture Show , Paper Moon is open-ended, never reaching a conclusion. In Joe David Brown's novel on which it was based, the young girl returned to live with her grandmother but the film version has the con-man and the child going off together, allegedly because the scriptwriter had never finished the book. Bogdanovich's two films have a touch of the maudlin. The other choices are arid, eschewing Hollywood tropes for cinema verite. The 1959 film 400 Blows ( Les quatre cents coups ), considered by many as one of the best ever made, was the directorial debut of François Truffaut. It follows Antoine Doinel, a rebellious young boy in Paris prone to skipping school, explaining his absences with lies about his mother's death, and stealing. Handed over to the police by his stepfather, Doinel is placed in an observation centre for troubled youths. It is an unflinching observation of adolescence, Truffaut would later observe: "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema." The film has an honest simplicity, perhaps reflecting its semi-autobiographical director once stated that films saved his life. It is sparse with every scene pared down to ensure that nothing is for pure are moments of humour. The best is a sequence showing their physical education teacher leading the boys on a jog through Paris as the children peel off until the teacher is at the head of a line leading one or two who remain. The film's ending is memorable. Antoine escapes under a fence and runs away to the ocean, which he has always wanted to see. He wades into the water. The final shot is a freeze-frame of Antoine, zooming in on his face as he looks directly into the camera. Bogdanovich found it difficult to reach the heights of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon or his screwball 1972 comedy What's Up Doc. Truffaut, who would die at 52 of a brain tumour, returned repeatedly to the world of youth and the classroom and his body of work includes several other, albeit less successful, films about Antoine Doinel. Directed by Amil Naderi, The Runner is an Iranian film released in 1984 before the country's filmmakers became fashionable in the West. Based on the director's own childhood like 400 Blows , it compares favourably to Vittoria De Sica's Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief, and Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados . Like those works, it is grounded in realism and explores themes of poverty, disparities in wealth and opportunities, youthful innocence and naivete. The central character Amiro (played by Madjid Niroum and with ferocious energy) is an illiterate 11-year-old orphan living alone in an abandoned tanker in the Iranian port city of Abadan. He scrapes a living, working odd jobs - diving for deposit bottles (until the appearance of sharks frightens him), shining shoes, and selling iced water. Bullied by older boys and adults, he struggles to better himself and enrols himself in a school to learn to read. The Runner is the most impressionistic of the five films. Episodic in nature, there are no backstories, explanations or even a conventional narrative. The film is torrent of fragments: the boy's day-to-day survival at society's margins, his friends, and encounters with foreigners. The defining image is of a race between the street kids on a rail track. The children push each other trying to be first to a block of ice which serves as the finish line. Amiro wins and rubs his burning face with cool water from the melting ice. He then shares it with his friends. The film opens with Amiro shouting at tankers far out in the Gulf. The film concludes with Amiro framed by an airplane taking motif of ships and planes runs through the film speaking to his thirst to leave behind his limited life. It is metaphor for all these children trying to escape their conditions. Naderi and his cinematographer Firooz Malekzadeh's used a stunning palette of colours and unusual camera work to create a distinctive visual vocabulary. It is complemented by a rough sound track, filled with the noise of streets and industrial machinery. The incandescent images remain with you long after the film. Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco ( Pixote: The Law of the Weakest) is a difficult film to watch. The director Héctor Babenco, who would go on to win fame for films like The Kiss of the Spiderwoman , created a frightening portrait of life in Brazil's favelas and streets. It is a territory that City of God would revisit but without the same brutal power. Many, including the late film critic Roger Ebert, considered it to be Babenco's most outstanding work. Shot like a documentary, it used amateur actors whose real lives resembled those of the film's protagonists. The central character Pixote (played by the illiterate 11-year-old Fernando Ramos da Silva) escapes a nightmarish reformatory only to drift into a life of crime. The story follows a makeshift group of criminals, prostitutes, and their clients who form floating alliances founded in violence, fear and need. The currency of this world is drugs and sex. Without homes and money, they turn to crime, the only means open to them to survive. The film's violence and graphic scenes are confronting. In part, this is because the individuals are not sophisticated or intelligent. The killings, one a mistake when an American client fights back because he does not understand Portuguese, are thoughtless. The children have no understanding or control over situations. Pixote's glazed eyes don't even seem to register the import of one killing and show no emotion. Hours later, watching TV, he suddenly vomits. Other scenes are confronting. The old prostitute Sueli is shown after performing an abortion on herself disposing of the foetus explaining everything in detail to Pixote. There is another in which she has intercourse with an underage boy, while Pixote lies in bed next to them watching TV. The depiction of children who only vaguely understand sex but are used to its sights without comprehension is powerful. Towards the end, Pixote turns to suck at Sueli's breast for comfort, hungry for any affection, but she pushes him away in disgust. The film has a tragic coda. Da Silva returned to the streets and was shot dead by police in 1987. Pixote is a unforgiving portrait of lives no human being should have to lead. Most of our childhoods are modestly pleasant. Problems are imagined or exaggerated. These five films, especially the last three, testify to the fact that not everyone is lucky enough to enjoy that privilege. Feuilleton is historically a part of an European newspaper or magazine devoted to material designed to entertain the general reader. Extraneus , in Latin 'an outsider', is a former financier and author. A reasonable club cricketer, he took up a career in money markets because he wasn't good enough to be a professional cricketer, needed to make a living and no one offered him a job as a cricket commentator or allowed him to pursue his other passions.
Fox News
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Tatum O'Neal rips father Ryan O'Neal after he cut her out of will: ‘Keep it'
Tatum O'Neal shared her scathing reaction to being cut out of her late father Ryan O'Neal's will. For most of her life, the 61-year-old actress had a famously turbulent relationship with the actor, who died at the age of 82 from congestive heart failure in 2023. During a recent interview with Variety, O'Neal revealed that she only learned that Ryan had disinherited her after his death and gave a candid response to the snub. "Keep it, motherf-----," O'Neal said. Ryan shared Tatum and her brother Griffin O'Neal, 60, with his late ex-wife Joanna Moore. He was also father to son Patrick O'Neal, 57, whom he shared with ex-wife Leigh Taylor-Young, as well as son Redmond O'Neal, 40, whom he shared with the late actress Farrah Fawcett. O'Neal and Griffin lived with their mother until 1970, when Moore lost custody of her children after being arrested for a DUI. Moore struggled with chronic alcohol and drug abuse problems and was arrested for driving under the influence multiple times. She died at the age of 63 from lung cancer in 1997. After Moore lost custody of O'Neal and Griffin, they began living with Ryan. At the age of 10, O'Neal became the youngest Oscar winner in history when she starred opposite her father in 1973's "Paper Moon." However, O'Neal revealed in the first of her two autobiographies, 2004's "A Paper Life," that their relationship became rocky after the movie's release, since her father was jealous of her success. "Things got ugly quick," O'Neal told Variety. In her memoir, O'Neal detailed Ryan's violent temper, alleging that she suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, who was also addicted to drugs. O'Neal also revealed that she was later molested by a drug dealer, who was a member of Ryan's inner circle. During her interview with Variety, O'Neal said she believed that Ryan excluded her from his will due to "A Paper Life." "The first book that I wrote was just a f---ing honest book," she said. "And that's what got him." In a 2004 statement to Dateline, Ryan denied the allegations that O'Neal made against him in "A Paper Life," and cited her own longtime struggles with drug and alcohol addiction. "It is a sad day when malicious lies are told in order to become a 'best seller,'" he said. "As a father, it is my hope that this book was written to serve as her therapy, and if this is what she needed to do to wake each day and live with herself, then I can only support her healing process, good, bad and ugly." He continued, "It is now my hope, that she remain sober, so that her perception of the future is nothing like her clouded memories of the past." In "A Paper Life," O'Neal recalled how her relationship with her father deteriorated after "Paper Moon." While Ryan's performance as conman Moses Pray earned praise from critics, O'Neal's portrayal of the orphaned Annie Loggins drew the most attention, with the young actress being declared a prodigy. O'Neal alleged that Ryan hit her after she received her Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. The "Love Story" star did not accompany his daughter to the awards ceremony and later admitted that her win led to tension within the family. "Everybody hated everybody because of that Academy Award," Ryan said in a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair. After she won her Academy Award, O'Neal told Variety that she was asked to audition for the role of child prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese's 1976 movie "Taxi Driver." While speaking with the outlet, O'Neal remembered Ryan telling her, "'No, you can't,'" as he believed that the part was "a little too naked." However, O'Neal shared her opinion that Ryan's envy might have led him to prevent her from auditioning for the role, which earned Jodie Foster her first Oscar nomination. "And I never really recovered from that," O'Neal said. Though O'Neal went on to star in the critically and commercially successful movies "The Bad News Bears," "International Velvet" and "Little Darlings," her career started to stagnate toward the end of her teenage years. O'Neal explained that her confidence in her acting ability began to wither under Ryan's blistering criticism. "He was controlling, and telling me, 'No, you're not good,'" she told Variety. "And so then I started to get not good, feeling scared all the time." At the time, O'Neal began to publicly struggle with addiction. She previously shared that she was given alcohol for the first time at her mother's house when she was six-years-old and alleged that Ryan introduced her and her brother to drugs. The actress's fame and hard-partying lifestyle led her to become a tabloid fixture and acting opportunities increasingly waned. In 1984, she began a highly-publicized and troubled romance with tennis star John McEnroe, who also had addiction problems. The pair, who share sons Kevin, 38 and Sean, 37, and daughter Emily, 33, tied the knot in 1986. However, their marriage ended in a bitter divorce in 1994. After her divorce, O'Neal attempted to mount an acting comeback, but her career stalled when she became seriously addicted to heroin. As she continued to battle addiction, O'Neal acted occasionally, mostly taking on minor parts in movies and making guest appearances in TV shows. O'Neal and Ryan were estranged for almost 20 years until they reconciled in 2009 following Fawcett's death. In 2011, the two starred in the OWN reality series "Ryan and Tatum: The O'Neals," which followed their failed attempts to repair their relationship. In May 2020, O'Neal almost died from a stroke she suffered after overdosing on pain medication, opiates and morphine. After her stroke, O'Neal remained hospitalized in a coma for six weeks, and she was left with lingering aphasia, which impacted her ability to speak, read and write. During her interview with Variety, O'Neal admitted that she did not know if she wanted to survive the stroke, even for her children. "I love them so much, but I'd already given so much," she says. "Part of me just didn't want to make it, you know?" However, O'Neal told Variety that she wants to leave her self-destructive habits in the past after her near-death experience. "Now I don't want to hurt myself," O'Neal said. "Now I don't want to f---ing take drugs again — I really don't." Though she has made strides in her recovery from the stroke, O'Neal suffers from memory issues and chronic pain. She told Variety that she recently underwent back surgery and is learning how to read again. Yet, O'Neal is continuing to struggle with sobriety, telling Variety that she relapsed on the night of the U.S. presidential election when she realized that President Donald Trump would emerge victorious. "I was with my gay friends, and was like, 'I'm going to have a glass of wine — maybe two,'" she recalled. "And then I was like, 'OK, damn: I have one day of sobriety.'" O'Neal revealed that she saw Ryan three times before he passed away. Shortly before Ryan's death, she visited her father at his Malibu home, which was destroyed in January during the Palisades Fire. The actress told Variety that she declined when Ryan offered her drugs during that visit, recalling, "I know he was drinking, smoking a lot of pot, and he was like, 'Here, take a pill,'" she says. "I was like, 'No, thank you.'" However, O'Neal's son Kevin, who assisted his mother during the Variety interview, told the outlet, "She drank that day though. Every single time she's seen her dad my entire life, something happens." Though O'Neal has struggled financially and inheriting part of Ryan's estate would have helped with her medical and rehabilitation bills, the actress said that she has found a new sense of freedom since her father's death. Kevin shared his view that O'Neal is now "letting go of how much space he took up in her life," noting "she was defined as the person who was abused by Ryan." "There wasn't much of a desire to be like, 'I can do great things,'" Kevin told his mother. "And I think today you can do great things." Kevin also revealed that he is developing a documentary project about his mother, which he hopes will generate income to cover some of her medical expenses. "As she changes, I think opportunities have begun to change for her," McEnroe says. "More things are coming our way as she starts to see the good in people and the good in the world. Something really shifted when he died that allowed her to be —" "Yes, just Tatum! Without my dad," she interjected. "Just Tatum is enough," Kevin told her. When asked if she felt that she was "almost there," O'Neal responded, "Yes!" "Even better than almost enough," she added.
