Tatum O’Neal Is Still Here: The Oscar Winner on Surviving Addiction, a Stroke and Coming to Terms With Being Left Out of Her Father’s Will

variety.com:

given so much,” she says. “Part of me just didn’t want to make it, you know?” She fell into a coma that lasted six weeks. Kevin McEnroe recalls having a conversation with a doctor who asked him if he knew whether O’Neal would “want to live essentially as a vegetable.” But he made a bet that she was still in there. “There’s something in her that you can’t explain — that perseveres through even horrible situations she put herself in,” he says.

When O’Neal woke up, her prognosis was dire: She was unable to talk or walk or even see. It’s been a very long road from there, but she’s continued to make improvements, relearning everything, steady as she goes.

And the biggest improvement has come from within. “Now I don’t want to hurt myself,” O’Neal says, speaking with that familiar steely rasp, untouched by time. “Now I don’t want to fucking take drugs again — I really don’t.” So today, we’re not here to tell sad stories: This is the story of how Tatum O’Neal has survived all of it.

She never did get an apology from her father — in fact, his coup de grâce was when she learned after his death that he’d cut her out of his will.