The headline puts the two facts in the same sentence and lets the juxtaposition speak. It does not claim that the father made the star, or that the star was made in spite of the father, or that the two facts are causally connected in any way that the evidence supports. It claims only that both facts are true and that they belong to the same biography.
This is the right approach to a story that resists more ambitious narrative framing. The temptation, in biographical writing about figures whose lives contain dramatic juxtapositions, is to find the connection — the hidden thread that links the dramatic elements into a coherent story with a satisfying moral. In this case, the connection is documented and real: Woody knew his father was in prison, visited him, funded his appeals, described him as charming and articulate, and found the shared birthday “mind-blowing.” The connection is the relationship, not a causal explanation of how the hitman produced the star or how the star transcended the hitman.
The article ends here because the story, at this level of documented detail, has been told. The facts are on record. The unknowns remain unknown. The headline’s promise has been kept: both the Hollywood star and the convicted hitman have been described at length, with the care that both subjects deserve — the son as an artist and a person, the father as a criminal and a person, the relationship between them as something that was real and consequential and that neither defines nor explains either man completely.