Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neal were one of Hollywood’s hottest couples throughout the 1980s, but behind the glamour of movie sets and red carpets, the couple were dealing with something a lot more relatable.
The Charlie’s Angels star and her partner were parents to son Redmond, who was born in 1985, and his arrival had a big impact on the parents’ home life – particularly their sleeping arrangements.
Writing in his 2012 book, Both of Us: My Life With Farrah, Ryan revealed that he and Farrah slept in separate beds after Redmond developed a preference for co-sleeping with them as a child. Ryan wrote that their son had “strong legs like his mother” and he would “burrow into the bed, decide he didn’t have enough room, and then start pushing with all his might, until I had no other choice but to sleep on the floor or in the other room.”
Despite Redmond eventually outgrowing the sleeping arrangements, his parents had got so used to their separate beds that they never reunited, something which Ryan said he regretted.
“Farrah and I had grown used to our privacy and it stuck, and even when we travelled after that, we’d often get adjoining rooms,” the actor continued. “I always thought of our arrangement as terribly mature of us. Now I wish I could have back every one of those nights we slept in separate beds.”
The couple’s volatile love story
In the memoir, Ryan also looked back on his tumultuous relationship with Farrah. The couple were in an on-off relationship for 30 years and despite Ryan proposing several times, the pair never married. “There is this thin, impenetrable veil between us,” Ryan wrote. “We’re professional and considerate to each other on the set; cool, almost aloof at home.”
He continued: “She accuses me of being bored and angry. Maybe she’s right. Sometimes our love just doesn’t make up the differences.”
Ryan and Farrah first met in 1979, when they were introduced by the iconic actress’s then-husband, Lee Majors. The actor had asked Ryan to check in on his wife while he was away filming, but the pair embarked on a passionate affair. “I was so overwhelmed by this mental and physical attraction for him that I didn’t think about anything except what was happening right there,” Farrah later told LIFE Magazine.
© Getty ImagesMeanwhile, Ryan said he was equally infatuated and said in an interview with the New York Daily News: “I lost interest in nearly everything but this woman. For the first time in my life, something took precedence over myself.”
Despite their unconventional sleeping arrangements, the pair remained together until 1997, when they separated. They then reconciled in 2001 after the Love Story star was diagnosed with Leukaemia, and stayed together until Farrah’s death from anal cancer in 2009. Ryan died aged 82 in December 2023. His everlasting love for his former partner remained evident long after her death, with the star previously sharing a photo of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and calling her his “forever Valentine”.
Celebrities who “sleep divorce”
Farrah and Ryan are from the only celebrity couple to have revealed their separate sleeping arrangements; a number of other famous faces have admitted to “sleep divorce”, with some even having separate living quarters in their lavish homes.
They include David and Victoria Beckham, who are believed to maintain separate bedrooms at their Cotswolds home, and Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Brad Falchuk, who didn’t live together full-time during their first year of marriage.
Read the full article here
