WITH her luxurious tresses and blinding smile, Farrah Fawcett helped redefine sex appeal in the 1970s as one of TV's Charlie's Angels.
She burst on the scene in 1976 as one-third of the crime-fighting trio, but left the show after one season. She
then had a flop on the big screen with Somebody Killed Her Husband, and turned to more serious roles in the 1980s and 1990s, winning praise playing an abused wife in The Burning Bed.
Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006. As she underwent treatment, she enlisted the help of actor Ryan O'Neal, her longtime companion and the father of her son, Redmond.
Her struggle with painful treatments and dispiriting setbacks was recorded in the television documentary Farrah's Story. Fawcett sought cures in Germany as well as the United States, battling the disease with iron determination even as her body weakened.
In the documentary, Fawcett is seen shaving off most of her trademark locks before chemotherapy could claim them. Toward the end, she's seen huddled in bed, barely responding to a visit from her son.
Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith comprised the original Angels, the sexy, police-trained trio of martial arts experts who took their assignments from a rich, mysterious boss named Charlie (John Forsythe, who was never seen on camera but whose distinctive voice was heard on speaker phone).
The programme debuted in September 1976, the height of what some critics derisively referred to as television's "jiggle show" era, and it gave each of the actresses ample opportunity to show off their figures as they disguised themselves in bathing suits and as prostitutes and strippers to solve crimes.
Backed by a clever publicity campaign, Fawcett – then billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors because of her marriage to Six Million Dollar Man star Lee Majors – quickly became the most popular Angel.
Her face helped sell T-shirts, lunch boxes, shampoo, wigs and even a novelty plumbing device called Farrah's faucet. Her flowing blond hair, pearly white smile and trim, shapely body made her a favourite with male viewers in particular.
A poster of her in a red swimsuit sold millions of copies and became a ubiquitous wall decoration in teenagers' rooms.
Thus the public and the show's producer, Spelling-Goldberg, were shocked when she announced after the series' first season that she was leaving to star in feature films. (Cheryl Ladd became the new Angel.)
But Fawcett was never able to duplicate her TV success in film. Her first star vehicle, the comedy-mystery Somebody Killed Her Husband, flopped and Hollywood cynics cracked that it should have been titled Somebody Killed Her Career.
The actress had also been in line to star in Foul Play for Columbia Pictures. But the studio opted for Goldie Hawn.
She finally reached an agreement to appear in three episodes of Charlie's Angels a season, an experience she called "painful".
She returned to making movies, including the futuristic thriller Logan's Run, the comedy-thriller Sunburn and the strange sci-fi tale Saturn 3, but none clicked with the public.
Fawcett fared better with television movies such as Murder in Texas, Poor Little Rich Girl and especially as an abused wife in 1984's The Burning Bed. The latter earned her an Emmy nomination and the long-denied admission from critics that she really could act.
As further proof of her acting credentials, Fawcett appeared onstage in Extremities as a woman who is raped in her own home. She repeated the role in the 1986 film version.
Not content to continue playing victims, she switched type. She played a murderous mother in the 1989 true-crime story Small Sacrifices and a tough lawyer on the trail of a thief in 1992's Criminal Behaviour.
She also starred in biographies of Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld and photographer Margaret Bourke-White.
In 1995, aged 50, Fawcett posed partly nude for Playboy magazine. The following year, she starred in a Playboy video in which she was equally unclothed while she sculpted and painted.
Fawcett's most unfortunate career moment may have been a 1997 appearance on David Letterman's show, when her disjointed, rambling answers led many to speculate she was on drugs. She denied this, and blamed her behaviour on questionable advice from her mother to be playful.
In September 2006, Fawcett, who at 59 maintained a strict regimen of tennis and paddleball, began to feel strangely exhausted. After two weeks of tests she was told she had cancer.
She struggled to maintain her privacy, but a UCLA Medical Centre employee pleaded guilty in late 2008 to violating federal medical privacy law for commercial purposes after selling records of Fawcett and other celebrities to the National Enquirer magazine.
Her decision to tell her own story in a TV documentary was meant as an inspiration to others, friends said. The segments showing her cancer treatment, including a trip to Germany, were originally shot for a personal, family record.
Born in Texas in 1947, she was named Mary Farrah Leni Fawcett. Her mother said she added the Farrah because it sounded good with Fawcett. She was less than a month old when she underwent surgery to remove a digestive tract tumour with which she had been born.
After school, Fawcett enrolled at the University of Texas. Fellow students voted her one of the ten most beautiful people on the campus and her photos were eventually spotted by movie publicist David Mirisch, who suggested she pursue a film career. After overcoming her parents' objections, she agreed.
Soon she was appearing in such TV shows as That Girl, The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie and The Partridge Family.
Majors became both her boyfriend and her adviser on career matters, and they married in 1973. She dropped his last name from hers after they divorced in 1982.
By then she had already begun her long relationship with O'Neal. They never married.
