Love Story Reunion: Ali MacGraw, Ryan O'Neal Recall "Sorry" Line, Actress Calls it "a Crock"

Our hearts...are breaking ...

By Corinne Heller Jun 27, 2014 9:01 PMTags
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This may break your heart...or, for you cynics, confirm what you'd believed all along—that the famous line from Love Story, "Love means never having to say you're sorry," is bogus.

At least, according to Ali MacGraw, who was the first to utter the words onscreen in the 1970 tearjerker, in which she played dying cancer patient Jenny Cavalleri. She and co-star Ryan O'Neal, who played her beau, young lawyer and "preppy" Oliver Barrett IV, reunited for an on-camera Hollywood Reporter interview, which was posted on Tuesday, June 25.

"It's a crock!" MacGraw, 75, told the outlet, regarding the "sorry" quote, the movie's tagline.

"You'd better say you're sorry!" added O'Neal, 73.

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Love Story was released on Dec. 16, 1970 and is based on a novel by Erich Segal (Spoiler alert: It's even sadder than the movie). The movie made more than $106 million in the United States and marked the only time MacGraw and O'Neal acted together onscreen. Love Story received seven Oscar nominations, including individual nods for the actors and one for Best Picture (it lost to Patton). The movie won one Academy Award, for Original Score.

Love Story's plotline may hit close to home for O'Neal, who has suffered health problems and personal tragedies over the years. The twice-divorced actor lost his longtime partner, actress Farrah Fawcett, mother of their son Redmond, to cancer on June 25, 2009. The actor had himself battled leukemia in the early 2000s. In 2012, O'Neal underwent treatment for prostate cancer. In 2013, he battled skin cancer.

He and MacGraw, who's been divorced three times, had lost touch in recent years.

"My house burned down in '93, so I moved to New Mexico," she told the Hollywood Reporter.

MacGraw and O'Neal have reunited several times over the years—in 1987, at Paramount Pictures' 75th anniversary party in Los Angeles, in 2000, during the launch of a cruise ship in Florida, and in 2002, at the Oscars.

"I love her and have always loved her," O'Neal told the Hollywood Reporter.