Ryan O’Neal hit on his own daughter at partner Farrah Fawcett’s funeral in June.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, the actor says he didn’t recognize the “beautiful blond woman” – who happened to be his daughter Tatum O’Neal – who embraced him at Fawcett’s funeral.
“I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blond woman comes up and embraces me … I said to her, ‘You have a drink on you? You have a car?’ She said ‘Daddy, it’s me – Tatum!’ I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.”
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Tatum, for her part, did not seem to be bothered by the encounter.
“That’s our relationship in a nutshell," she told Vanity Fair. "You make of it what you will. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.”
O’Neal also admitted that a brief affair he had during a break with Fawcett was a “replacement” for his estranged daughter.
Of his relationship with Leslie Stefanson, an actress who was half his age at the time, he said: “I was lucky enough to meet this young girl. She was more of a daughter to me than a lover, and my own daughter had flown the coop, so here was this replacement.”
Tatum O’Neal was 16 when her father moved in with Fawcett, which she said took a long time for her to get over. In a 2004 memoir, she said she wouldn’t do that to her kids but that she didn’t blame Fawcett, whom she called “inspirational, beautiful and kind.”
RELATED: Click here to read the full interview at Vanity Fair.com.
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Vanity Fair is available on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on August 5 and nationwide on August 11.