Tatum O'Neal 'almost died' after stroke left her in a coma

Academy Award winner Tatum O’Neal, who has struggled with drug addiction and multiple rehab stints for decades, has revealed that three years ago, a devastating stroke placed her in a six-week coma.

“I almost died,” said O’Neal, 59, in the new issue of People magazine, going on to detail, “I was in a coma and nobody could figure out if I was going to die or if I was going to live. And I lived.” But, she went on, she came out of the coma  “without any words” — diagnosed with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects the language centers and for which she continues to undergo speech therapy.

Upon awakening, she said, “[T]e first thing I thought about was my mother,” the late actor Joanna Moore, who was married to Tatum’s father, actor Ryan O’Neal, from 1963 to 1967 and who also suffered substance-abuse issues. “But I didn’t know where I was,” Tatum O’Neal continued. “What to think. And I had no words. Nothing.”

“She couldn’t say ‘I’m scared,’ ” noted son Kevin McEnroe, 37, the eldest of her three children with her former husband, tennis champ-turned-commentator John McEnroe. Her son added, "She also had a cardiac arrest and a number of seizures. … There were times we didn't think she was going to survive."

He explained that in May 2020, during the early days of  the COVD-19 pandemic, his mother had been taking prescription pain medication for rheumatoid arthritis and other health issues, and then added opiates. "She had become very isolated," Kevin McEnroe said. "With the addition of morphine and heavier pharmaceuticals, it was getting scary.” She was hospitalized after a friend discovered her overdosed in her apartment in Los Angeles’ Century City neighborhood.

Seeing his mother in a coma, “I was worried she might be like a vegetable,” McEnroe said. “… [A]nd then I got a call from the health care facility that she had escaped. And I remember thinking Tatum’s still in there and it actually made me happy. I thought she’s still in there, we’re going to get through this.”

He conceded, “That might not have been the normal reaction. … But I just thought the fighter in her was overcoming some of this stuff.”

“I kept wanting to leave, I’ll tell you that,” O’Neal said.

The actor regularly attends 12-step meetings and wears a patch to treat opioid addiction. “No more drugs. No more pills. I don’t want to use anymore,” she said. “I’m trying so hard with sobriety. I just take it one day at a time.”

O’Neal remains the youngest person to win a competitive Academy Award, accepting it at age 10 for Peter Bogdanovich’s Depression-era con-artist comedy “Paper Moon” (1973). Her long screen career includes the films “The Bad News Bears” (1976), “Basquiat” (1996), “This Is 40” (2012) and most recently “Not to Forget” (2021), as well as playing the sister of series star Denis Leary’s character in 39 episodes of the 2004-11 FX drama “Rescue Me.”

She and McEnroe, to whom she was married from 1986 before separating in 1992 and subsequently divorcing, were wed in Oyster Bay. In addition to Kevin, they have son Sean, 35, and daughter Emily, 32.