`Sober` Tatum O’Neal starts life afresh sans dad

Washington -  Actress Tatum O’Neal, who has been addicted to drugs since long, has revealed that she will be starting a new chapter of her life without her dad Ryan.

The ‘Paper Moon’ star had attempted to reconcile with Ryan through an OWN reality series that aired last year, but the father-daughter duo currently are not speaking to each other and the actress has come to terms with that.

“That’s what turned out to be the best thing for me,” ABC News quoted her as saying.

“I’ve just kind of had enough. The amount of therapy I’ve been through, you start to understand that certain types of people really don’t change,” she said.

The O’Neals had talked recently and Ryan had asked her to read his book about his life with longtime partner Farrah Fawcett, which came out in May.

The 48-year-old actress has a book of her own, “Found,” that chronicled her fraught history with her father, who left her to move in with Fawcett when Tatum was 16.

Even after reading about how he failed to recognize her at Fawcett’s funeral in 2009, hearing how he told her he had early stage prostate cancer in April is unsettling.

“He texted me in all caps,” Tatum said.

“‘GOT CANCER. HAVING PROSTATE REMOVED.’ Luckily, I knew his oncologist, so I could call him and find out what was really going on,” she said.

Instead of trying to fix the relationship, Tatum has shifted her attention elsewhere, like finding a way to cure her recurring pain while staying sober.

In February, it was rumoured that the actress was back in rehab. The former wife of John McEnroe has struggled with addiction for years, and most recently she was arrested for buying crack cocaine on a New York City street corner in 2008.

But this time, she was under supervised treatment following her back surgery.

“At the end of the day, medication doesn’t work,” Tatum said.

“You don’t want to take painkillers. Maybe it works for a day or two or a week, but ultimately, you can’t rely on it.

Meds have been around forever, but it’s just amazing to me, in AA meetings, to see how many people have become severely addicted.”

She took to acupuncturists, massage therapists and chiropractors to help manage her back pain, which she attributes to falling out of a moving car when she was fifteen-year-old and attempting Madonna’s cardio-heavy exercise routine in the ‘80s. (“I ended up hurting myself,” she said. “I don’t have the kind of body for that.”)

She had begun abusing drugs and alcohol after rocketing to fame as a nine-year-old, when she had starred in ‘Paper Moon’ alongside her father and became the youngest actress ever to win an Oscar.

Though Tatum has said that she “was never a party girl” and noted that she’s “never had a no-underwear shot,” she feels a kinship with the 25-year-old actress Lindsay Lohan, who’s been in and out of prison and court on substance-abuse related charges for the past five years.

While making sure the demons of her past don’t rise again, she is looking forward to the future.

She called being a mom to her three children -- Kevin, 26, Sean, 23, and Emily, 21 -- with ex-husband John McEnroe “the thing in my life that I’m happiest about,” and she’s still very much invested in Hollywood.

 â€œI’m fighting to get a good role. I look at actors who’ve had to fight really hard, like Michael Shannon in ‘Take Shelter,’” one of the breakout films of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, “and I tell myself that I need to continue to try, that it’s not frivolous or embarrassing to do that at my age,” she said.

“I think having a normal life, which I’ve never had, sounds pretty nice. Moving to Big Sur or Oregon or upstate New York. But then there’s always the case of, I need to make a living.

“Get enough money to retire. Maybe find a mate that is nice and stable. I wish I could stop, in a way, but there’s all that. But sure, maybe I will become a mountain woman and grow my hair out,” she added.