Obituary: Farrah Fawcett

Jun 29 2009 by William Leece, Liverpool Daily Post

THERE can hardly have been a single red-blooded male who did not have a special place in his heart for Farrah Fawcett in the 1970s.

She was America’s number one pin-up girl in the middle of the decade. And where America went, the rest of the world followed, at least when it came to jaw-droppingly beautiful young women.

The hair, the teeth, the figure: Farrah had the lot. Plus a lead role as Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels, a piece of television hokum that had three improbably glamorous women fighting international crime directed by the mysterious Charlie.

She had originally studied art at the University of Texas, but was spotted by a Hollywood publicist and whisked away for a modelling and acting career.

Her films included the 1970 Myra Breckinridge, later slated as one of the worst films of all time, despite the presence of heavyweights such as John Huston and Mae West.

She married Lee Majors, appearing opposite him in The Six Million Dollar Man on television.

It was this work that got her, as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, the part in Charlie’s Angels. Yet, after a year or so, she had quit the series amid a row over merchandising rights.

Her next big starring role was in The Cannonball Run in 1981, and showed herself ready to ditch the glamour in a number of films about domestic violence.