Farrah Fawcett (1947-2009): The Original Earthly Angel

Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, California. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.
Her death, at St. John's Health Center, was caused by cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.
To an extraordinary degree, Fawcett's cancer battle was played out in public, generating enormous interest worldwide. Her face, often showing the ravages of cancer, became a tabloid fixture, and updates on her health became staples of television entertainment news.
In May, that battle was chronicled in a prime-time NBC documentary, “Farrah's Story,” some of it shot with her own home video recorder. An estimated nine million people viewed it. Fawcett had initiated the project with a friend.
Fawcett's career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and stage as well as missed opportunities.
She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined. No poster like it has achieved anywhere near its popularity since, and, arriving before the Internet era, in which the most widely disseminated images are now digital, it may have been the last of its kind.
Fawcett won praise for her serious acting later in her career, typically as a victimised woman. But she remained best known for the hit 1970s television show “Charlie's Angels,” in which she played Jill Munroe, one of three beautiful women employed as private detectives by an unseen male boss who (in the voice of John Forsythe) issued directives and patronising praise over a speaker phone. Her pinup fame had led the producers to cast her.
Fawcett and her fellow angels, played by Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, brought evildoers to justice, often while posing in decoy roles that put them in skimpy outfits or provocative situations.
“Charlie's Angels,” created and produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg for ABC, was a phenomenon, finishing the 1976-77 season as the No. 5 network show, the highest-rated television debut in history at that time.
Fawcett was its breakout star. Although she left the show after one season and returned only sporadically thereafter, the show's influence -- among other things, it inspired two much later feature films starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu -- was so indelible that she was forever associated with it.
Fawcett acknowledged that her sex symbol status was a mixed blessing. It made her famous, but it often obscured the acting talent that brought her three Emmy nominations, most notably for “The Burning Bed,” a critically acclaimed movie about domestic violence.
“I don't think an actor ever wants to establish an image,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. “That certainly hurt me, and yet that is also what made me successful and eventually able to do more challenging roles. That's life. Everything has positive and negative consequences.”

Compiled by Cultural Correspondent