NEW YORK- Actor Patrick O’Neal, who appeared on stage, on television and in more than a dozen films, has died at age 66.
Mr. O’Neal, who lived in Greenwich Village, died in a Manhattan hospital Friday of respiratory failure, said his wife, Cynthia. He suffered from tuberculosis and cancer, she said.
At his death, Mr. O’Neal was a co-owner, with his wife and his brother, Michael, of O’Neal’s, a Manhattan restaurant that was named the Ginger Man until 1993.
In 1963, he played the lead role, Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, in “The Ginger Man,” a play by J.P. Donleavy based on his novel of the same title, at the off-Broadway Orpheum Theater.
One critic praised his acting in that production as likely to entrance theatergoers who had met Dangerfield in the novel and found him “enchanting and amusing for all his waywardness, his cruelty and his insincerity.”
Mr. O’Neal went on to use the name when he co-founded the Ginger Man in 1964. It prospered, drawing patrons from the Lincoln Center area and farther afield. It was the first of a half-dozen restaurants, mostly in Manhattan, that he came to co-own over the years.
Mr. O’Neal’s other stage roles included the defrocked cleric in Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana,” a role he first played in a short form of the drama in Spoleto, Italy, in 1959 and went on to play in other productions on Broadway and elsewhere.
Among his films were “A Fine Madness” (1966), “The Kremlin Letter” (1970), “In Harm’s Way” (1965), “King Rat” (1965), “The Way We Were” (1973) and “The Stepford Wives” (1975). He also acted in many television shows and series.
