By LIZZIE SMITH
Last updated at 8:22 AM on 04th August 2009
Ryan O'Neal has admitted he tried to chat up his own daughter at the funeral of his long-term lover Farrah Fawcett.
The 68-year-old hadn't seen his daughter Tatum, 45, for 'a few years' and didn't recognise her when she approached him after the service for his former wife.
'I had just put the casket in the hearse and I was watching it drive away when a beautiful blonde woman comes up and embraces me,' he said.
I tried to hit on her: Ryan O'Neal with his daughter Tatum in August 2003
'I said to her, "You have a drink on you? You have a car?" She said, "Daddy, it’s me - Tatum!"
'I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman and it’s my daughter. It’s so sick.'
Ryan makes the admission in a profile on Farrah for Vanity Fair, in which he also calls himself 'a hopeless father'.
Early life: A young Tatum with her father Ryan, who she hadn't seen 'in a few years' until her stepmother's funeral
Tatum was also interviewed and said the incident was: 'Our relationship in a nutshell. You make of it what you will.
'It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and he was always a ladies’ man, a bon vivant.'
Didn't recognise her: Tatum in February this year
Charlie’s Angels star Farrah, who died of cancer aged 62 on June 25, was reconciled with Ryan in the months before her death.
Ryan's son with Farrah, Redmond O'Neal, reveals he doubts that his father's public outpouring of grief was genuine.
'All those crocodile tears!... My dad's only goal was to make sure he would be in the will,' he said.
'It was so disgustingly transparent as soon as he found out she was terminal. I consider him a vulture presiding over a carcass. Ryan thought he was going to get everything.'
If this were Ryan's motivation it proved unfounded - Farrah left nearly all her £3.65million estate to Redmond.
Redmond, 24, who has battled drug and alcohol addiction for most of his life, is currently in a Los Angeles prison for drugs offences.
Tatum's brother Griffin O'Neal opened up about Ryan's failures as a father.
'My father is afraid of me because I know the truth,' Griffin said. 'That's the part that absolutely scares him to death.'
Griffin alleges that the family's problems stem from Ryan.
'My father gave me cocaine when I was 11 and insisted I take it... He was violent all the way through my upbringing,' said Griffin.
'He was a very abusive, narcissistic psychopath. He gets so mad he can't control anything he's doing.'
Anger: Griffin O'Neal says his father forced him to take drugs as a child
Tatum wrote a book about her childhood, much to her father's annoyance.
'No parent wants to hear their kid saying [awful] things about them. ... But what I wrote in the book was true. I've got a battle with drugs, but I'm a strong, independent person, and I fight for myself, and my father and I butt heads.
'When I was 16 years old, he and Farrah moved in together, and after that I saw my dad periodically, and that took a long time for me to get over.'
Ryan and Farrah met in 1979, split up in 1998, and then reconnected in 2001, when he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
'We pulled apart, but we never popped loose,' he tells Vanity Fair.
He puts their break up in 1998 down to Farrah going through the menopause.
'I believe Farrah was going through some kind of life change,' he said. 'I didn’t have a change of life. I was always a jerk.
'But they’re hard work, these divas; I was sick of it, and I was unappreciated. I just don’t think she liked me very much.
'So I excused myself, and I was lucky enough to meet this young girl. She was more a daughter to me than a lover, and my own daughter had flown the coop, so here was this replacement.'
The 'young girl' he met was actress Leslie Stefanson, with whom Farrah found him in bed on Valentine's Day.
Of this Ryan says: 'It was terrible. I didn’t expect to see her down there. I tried to put my pants on, but I put both legs in one hole.'