She recalls laughter, sunshine and the smell of Coppertone suntan lotion in her fondest recollection of her father, Tyrone Power. “I have this memory of hanging on his back in the swimming pool,” the actor’s younger daughter, Taryn Power Greendeer, confides in this week’s issue of Closer magazine, on newsstands now. “I remember the feeling of holding on to someone I really trusted. I felt safe.”
With charisma and striking good looks, Tyrone was a matinee idol in the 1930s and ’40s and a devoted father. “When he came home he would come straight to the nursery,” his oldest daughter, Romina Power, author of Searching for My Father, Tyrone Power, tells Closer.
His second wife, Linda Christian, whom he married in 1949, miscarried twice before giving birth to Romina in 1951 and Taryn in 1953. Though Tyrone doted on his girls, as the third generation in a family of esteemed actors (his father was English-born thespian Tyrone Power Sr.) he also longed for a son to carry on his name.
“My mom said that if I had been a boy, he would never have left,” says Taryn, whose parents split acrimoniously in 1956. Two years later, Tyrone married Deborah Ann Minardos. She was two months away from giving birth to Tyrone Power Jr. when her husband died of a massive heart attack on the set of Solomon and Sheba.
Tyrone was just 44 when he passed, but he would be proud that all three of his children grew up to become actors, too. “The last chapter of my father’s life was pretty unfortunate. He never got to see or hold his son,” notes Taryn, “but now we have a half brother who we are very close to.”
Read this story and more in this week’s issue of Closer magazine, on newsstands now!
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