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Ali MacGraw And Ryan O’Neal Are Together Again For The First Time In Love Letters Next Week

Ali MacGraw, Ryan O’Neal will star in Love Letters at the Broward Center next week (Photo by Austin Hargrave)

By Bill Hirschman, FloridaTheaterOnStage.com, for SouthFloridaReporter.com, July 15, 2015 – Interviewing Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, or trying to, about their upcoming national tour of Love Letters that kicks off in Fort Lauderdale next week seems almost churlishly interfering with a warm reunion of old friends.

The off-topic banter and wandering riffs worthy of a vaudeville act are clearly spontaneous and genuine, and asking questions really just gets in the way.

Some interviewees, like Broadway’s Bernadette Peters, are cordial, but it’s clear you can’t ask a question she hasn’t heard 100 times and for which she doesn’t have carefully honed and homogenized answer memorized.

But on the phone, these two natter along in about as unscripted a session as you could imagine.

The chemistry is palpable, not of old lovers, but old buddies. In fact, they admit, that while they have remained friends for 40-plus years, they see each other only every once in a while. “We christened a ship together on a cruise to the Bahamas,” he said. Enough time goes by between times that they spent much of these interviews catching up on friends and family and career.