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Ryan O’Neal battling to keep Warhol painting of Fawcett

A lawsuit brought by the University of Texas against Ryan O’Neal over a big-bucks Andy Warhol painting of his late flame Farrah Fawcett comes to trial Wednesday with a cast of witnesses worthy of a “Charlie’s Angels” episode.

In fact, Fawcett’s co-star Jaclyn Smith is on the witness list — along with O’Neal, Redmond O’Neal — the son he had with Fawcett — and Fawcett friend Alana Stewart.

At issue is a silk-screen pop-art style portrait of Fawcett done by Warhol in 1980, and now believed to be worth several million dollars.

When Fawcett died of cancer in 2009, her will left all the art she owned to the University of Texas, which she attended in the 1960s before heading to Hollywood.

One of the paintings subsequently delivered to the university’s Austin campus was a Warhol portrait of Fawcett, with bright-green eyes. But an informant, described as a boyfriend of Fawcett, later disclosed that Warhol did a second, virtually identical version of the painting.

The university’s trustees hired detectives to track it down, and they allegedly found it in the Malibu home of O’Neal.

The trustees sued the star for the Malibu painting. O’Neal responded that the university had already received the painting that Fawcett owned. The Malibu painting belonged to him, he said. It was a gift to him from Warhol, whom he introduced to Fawcett.

And he countersued, saying that a signed sketch that Warhol did on a cloth napkin when the three of them were at dinner one night had wrongly ended up in the university’s Blanton Museum of Art.

The trial is expected to last two weeks and is expected to focus on Fawcett’s relationship with O’Neal.

O’Neal and Fawcett were a longtime couple but never married. They split in 1997, and she left him out of her will.

During his deposition, O’Neal acknowledged that Fawcett found him in bed with another woman in February 1997 and moved out.

O’Neal, 72, said it was a year after that that Fawcett took O’Neal’s version of the Warhol painting to her home.

He said he retrieved the painting after Fawcett’s death because it belonged to him.