Farrah Fawcett dies after battle with cancer

Farrah Fawcett through the years | Sign the online guestbook | Fawcett, 1947-2009

• TV Talk blogger Kevin D. Thompson’s interview with the actress five years ago: Remembering Farrah: She was funny, gorgeous

• Anne Rodgers’s chat with Alana Stewart, Farrah Fawcett ’s BFF: 30-year friendship only grew as they battled her cancer together

Hers was the poster that lit up tens of thousands of dorm rooms.

Hers was the career that showed the promise – as well as the perils – of sudden, overwhelming fame.

She started out as a pouffy-haired Texas model married to TV star Lee Majors, but when she died of cancer Thursday morning in Los Angeles at age 62, she was universally recognized by a single name:

Farrah.

And years after her role on TV’s Charlie’s Angels, a middling movie career and her on-again, off-again love affair with Ryan O’Neal, Farrah Fawcett again captured the public’s imagination as she allowed TV cameras to document her struggle with cancer.

How will she remembered?

Probably for her bravery at the end, and the beginning, too – that red bathing suit, the waterfall of hair, the dazzling smile.

“Farrah was the modern-day pinup,” said actor and part-time West Palm Beach resident George Hamilton, a friend of Ms. Fawcett’s. “Everything that the ’40s brought, from Betty Grable to Marilyn Monroe, she was that to our generation of the ’60s (and ’70s). Everybody dreamed of Farrah.”

Palm Beach-based handbag designer Lana Marks met Ms. Fawcett many years ago in Los Angeles. She described her as “a regular girl, deep down” and together they had dinners and went to Oscar parties.

“That poster of her was really quite something,” Marks said. “When I’d be out with her and people would come up to her and mention that, she felt good.”

Said Jaclyn Smith, her Charlie’s Angels co-star: “Farrah had courage, she had strength and she had faith. And now she has peace as she rests with the real angels.”

Ms. Fawcett came to Palm Beach County in 1980, at the height of her post-Charlie’s Angels popularity, to make her stage debut at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter. She appeared in a three-week run of Butterflies Are Free, directed by Dom DeLuise.

Greg Hauptner, head of the G-Star School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, is a former celebrity hairdresser who worked on her famous ‘do for the stage appearance.

“I did her hair when it was the biggest head of hair in the world,” Hauptner said. “Her natural color was a dirty blonde, but it had a natural spring to it unlike any hair I’ve ever seen. She had a lot of it, and it was very wavy. Anything you did, it would bounce for days.”

Beyond that, he recalled Ms. Fawcett as “easily one of the nicest people of all the celebrities I’ve met. Her passport said ‘actress,’ but she said she always felt like a phony, because Charlie’s Angels wasn’t really acting.

“She was super kind. I sat down at rehearsals and she came over and asked me if I wanted a drink of water, and then went and got me a glass of water. She would go out to nightclubs and people would grab her hair as she walked by. They would yank on it, to see if it was real. It used to drive her nuts.”

Before 1976, Ms. Fawcett was just a young ingenue, appearing in episodes of TV series and commercials, including a Noxzema ad with football legend Joe Namath.

When Charlie’s Angels went on the air in September 1976, she began a dizzying ascent. She shot 29 episodes that first year, earning a reported $10,000 a week, but the work was hard and the money wasn’t worth it, at least not compared to the movie offers that flooded in. She walked off the show and negotiated a deal that called for her to make several appearances a year for the next two years.

But her movie career didn’t take off: Somebody Killed Her Husband, Sunburn, Saturn 3, The Cannonball Run with Reynolds and DeLuise. At that point, many wrote her off as a bimbo who was in over her deliciously tousled head.

But those perceptions changed in 1984 when she went back to television and starred in The Burning Bed, a brutal drama about a victim of spousal abuse. With one film, Ms. Fawcett earned street cred as a serious actress, one she strengthened with Extremities on Broadway and in a 1986 movie.

After that, Ms. Fawcett settled down to a nominal career as a well-known television star who made just enough appearances to keep her celebrity bona fides intact. She made small appearances in independent films, such as Robert Duvall’s The Apostle and Robert Altman’s Dr. T and the Women.

But she drew more notice for off-screen troubles than for her work, and some of the troubles echoed her acting roles. In 1998, her boyfriend at the time beat her up and went to jail, and her romance with Ryan O’Neal, which began in the early ’80s, resulted in lots of publicity and a son, Redmond, born in 1985.

In 2006, she was diagnosed with anal cancer. In May of this year, NBC showed a widely seen documentary, Farrah’s Story, that showed in grueling detail her day-to-day struggle to stay alive through experimental cancer treatments in Germany.

Marks said she will sorely miss her friend.

“She was very bright. Sharp. And kind. And giving. And stunningly beautiful, always.”
Staff writers Anne Rodgers and Staci Sturrock and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

 Loading ...