'Love Story' Duo Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal Reunite for ‘Love Letters’

Gwynne Watkins
Updated
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Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in ‘Love Story’

Forty-five years after Love Story, Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal are resuming their onscreen romance. The stars of the classic 1970 tearjerker are reuniting this week to perform the two-character play Love Letters at Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center for the Performing Arts. The play marks the first time they’ve acted together since Love Story.

“It feels so great to be reunited,” MacGraw, 76, tells People. “Our chemistry has not changed. We still feel the same about each other.”

In Love Story, O’Neal played Oliver, a wealthy college student who gives up his inheritance to marry Jenny (MacGraw), a fellow student from a poor background. Just as they’re ready to start a family, the couple learns that Jenny is dying of leukemia. The tragic romance was the highest-grossing film of 1970, and made an iconic couple of O’Neal and McGraw. In real life, the two never dated — though O’Neal, 74, says he has harbored a longtime crush on his co-star.

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MacGraw and O’Neal at a ‘Love Letters’ event in February (Walter McBride/Getty Images)

“We are more than friends,” he says. “She is like my sister, only she had better lock her door at night so I can’t get in there. We have some unfinished business, and we are running out of time!“

Both actors still look back on Love Story with affection. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter last year, O’Neal described the film as “the best time I ever had on a movie.”

“Making it was actually unbelievably fun the whole time; I was stupid and new enough in the business to think it was always like that,” MacGraw, who left Hollywood in 1993 for New Mexico, told THR.

Now the two stars are picking up where they left off. “Working together again is a dream come true,” O’Neal tells People. “Ali is an original. She is giving and sensitive to others, and we have never had an argument or cross word all of these years.”

First produced on Broadway in 1989, A.R. Gurney’s play Love Letters chronicles a 50-year relationship between two longtime friends and sometime-lovers. The current Fort Lauderdale production played on Broadway last year with a rotating cast of stars, including Mia Farrow, Brian Dennehy, Candice Bergen, and Alan Alda.

Watch the trailer for ‘Love Story:’