FAMOUS Farewells OF 2023

CLOSER PAYS TRIBUTE TO THE ICONIC STARS WHO HELPED SHAPE OUR WORLD

Ryan O’Neal

1941-2023 

Ryan O’Neal became a household name on TV’s Peyton Place and a film star with 1970’s Love Story. “He was a skilled actor, charming and funny, too,” recalled his co-star Ali MacGraw. A few years later, his preteen daughter, Tatum, became his leading lady in Paper Moon, which won her an Oscar. By the 1980s, Ryan’s turbulent personal life began overshadowing his work. Brawls, family feuds, substance abuse, and a nearly two-decade-long on-off relationship with Farrah Fawcett kept him in the headlines. Still, Ryan was by Farrah’s side when she passed in 2009 and eventually reached a better place with his family. “I feel very lucky,” said Tatum, “that we ended on such good terms.”

Raquel Welch

1940-2023

“I was always striving to live up to my sex-goddess image. I felt that I had to be glamorous,” Raquel Welch once admitted. And since bursting onto the Hollywood scene in a doeskin bikini in 1966’s One Million Years B.C., she proved to be that and more. Over her long and diverse career, Raquel tackled action, drama, and comedy — winning a Golden Globe for her role in 1973’s The Three Musketeers — as well as Broadway and cabaret. Raquel, who died on Feb. 15 at 82, proved something to herself along the way. “As life goes on, you get more valuable as a person,” she reflected. “Personally, I think I look better because I have lived, and I have a different kind of aura about me having lived.”