Farrah Fawcett, 1970s pin-up girl and star of the massively successful Charlie's Angels TV series, has succumbed to cancer, aged 62.
Her career began in television with appearances in series like SWAT and The Six Million Dollar Man, but she was initially most famous for her marriage to Lee Majors, until her Angels role as Jill Munroe made her a primetime household name. She only stayed for one season (replaced subsequently by Cheryl Ladd as her younger sister), and earned more from poster royalties than from the actual show, but it was long enough to make her an icon of sorts. The Farrah hairstyle was the Rachel of its day.
Her film career never quite reached great heights: there were appearances in** Logan's Run** (1976) and The Cannonball Run (1981), as well as the truly oddball Saturn 3 (1980), which co-starred Kirk Douglas and a dubbed Harvey Keitel, with a script by Martin Amis. Latterly, she could boast of having worked with Robert Altman, even if Dr T and the Women (2000) was not the great director's finest hour.
She garnered an Emmy nomination (the first of three) in 1984 for TV movie The Burning Bed, and a Golden Globe nomination (one of four) for Extremities, repeating a theatre role that won her critical acclaim off-Broadway. She also appeared in popular series' like Ally McBeal and Spin City. Some eyebrows were raised when, having always refused nudity in films or magazines, she posed for Playboy in 1995.
Fawcett's cancer was diagnosed in 2006. For a time it was in remission, but returned with a vengeance in May 2007, at which point Fawcett began to document her illness on camera. The resulting film, the devastating Farrah's Story, aired last month on NBC to 9 million viewers.
Fawcett had a son, Redmond, with Ryan O'Neal, her partner for the last 27 years. The couple had decided to marry last week, but the ceremony never took place.