Tatum O'Neal's gift, as a child or as a grown woman, is refusing to ask the audience for anything. The Paper Moon performance remains one of the finest things a child has done on screen; the adult career has used her far less than it should.
Fi1m perspective
In Paper Moon (1973) a small girl sits in a con man's car and Peter Bogdanovich's camera simply waits to see what she will do. What Tatum O'Neal does is talk, in a husky voice too low for her size, with the blunt, unhurried delivery of someone who has already worked out the odds. She had never acted before, had no training, and was playing opposite her own father, Ryan O'Neal. We think she wins every scene, and that is not a kindness to a child: the long stretches of dialogue are hers, and the adult in the frame spends them catching up.
That first performance set the type and the type held for the rest of the decade. She was the pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer in The Bad News Bears (1976), another child among exasperated grown-ups and the best comic company she found; she went back to Bogdanovich and her father for Nickelodeon (1976); she carried International Velvet (1978) and, with Kristy McNichol, Little Darlings (1980). From the mid-1980s the work thinned out. Certain Fury (1985) is the sort of title that fills a gap rather than a career, and a supporting part in Basquiat (1996) was a rare appearance in anything we would call substantial.
The return came in television. As Maggie Gavin on Rescue Me, the brash, troubled sister of Denis Leary's Tommy, she found the adult version of the child who talked back: a woman who says the unsayable at family gatherings and is not sorry. The programme itself, we thought, was coarse, funny and braver about grief than most films about 9/11, and it ran out of ways to break Tommy well before it finished; Maggie belongs to the stretch that works. Her other grown-up roles have run to the outspoken and the smug, a mother in Sex and the City among them, and she is good at both because she still does not ask to be liked.
Watching Paper Moon again, we were surprised by how little the performance wants from us: no wet eyes, no look to the gallery, just a child who has decided she will not be left behind and says so in as few words as possible, and that refusal moved us more than any amount of pleading would have. It is the thing she has always had and the thing the industry has least known what to do with. She has said of herself, "I think I would work consistently, but I suck at auditioning." Any writer with a blunt woman in the script who needs playing without apology could save everyone the audition and simply call her.
Biography
Tatum O'Neal is an American actress. Born on 5 November 1963 in Los Angeles, California, she made her screen debut at the age of ten in the 1973 film Paper Moon, playing Addie Loggins opposite her father Ryan O'Neal. For the role she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the youngest person to win a competitive Oscar.
O'Neal starred in The Bad News Bears (1976) as Amanda Whurlitzer and appeared in Basquiat (1996). She has taken guest roles in television series including Sex and the City (1998) and Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001), and played Maggie Gavin in a recurring capacity on Rescue Me from 2005.
