Farrah Fawcett: The Golden Girl Who Didn't Fade

• Share

(2 of 2)

So ubiquitous a media sensation was Fawcett in that year of grace that she was written into magazine pieces on utterly unrelated topics. A June 1977 TIME cover story on the health boom began with this larkish "BULLETIN: Noted Physical Fitness Enthusiast Farrah Fawcett-Majors will appear in the tenth, 20th and 30th paragraphs of this article, jogging nude around the Central Park Reservoir, pausing every 50 yards to give a demonstration of rope-skipping. Aerobics points will be awarded to readers." The same summer, New Times magazine put her on the cover with the tagline: Absolutely Nothing in This Issue About Farrah Fawcett-Majors. (Read an account from the photographer who made Fawcett an icon.)

Cultural historians could have predicted the ebbing of Fawcett's impact, for the thing about America is that it always imagines itself as young and beautiful — but the icons it chooses to emblematize that beauty are bound to age. Luster tarnishes, even on a golden girl. And the popular media are restless beasts; their attention can fix on one object for only so long. In time, about a year, Farrahmania faded. Fans and tabloid editors turned off the Fawcett and found some other darling; it might have been Travolta. She quit Charlie's Angels, hoping for movie stardom, but her first vehicle, the dark comedy Somebody Killed Her Husband, flopped. Soon the popular press ran absolutely nothing about Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

Monarch of Melodrama
So she changed careers and became an actress. For much of the '80s, Fawcett was the monarch of the TV-movie biopics, spinning plausible impersonations of heiress Barbara Hutton, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White and Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld. In the 1984 The Burning Bed, she earned an Emmy nomination (her first of three) as a real-life battered woman who sets the rack of her shame on fire, with her abusive husband in it. She took a similar part — another woman who exacts vengeance from the man who raped her — in William Mastrosimone's off-Broadway play and then 1986 movie Extremities. Facing every sordid challenge with a schoolgirl's stern concentration, she gave herself to the bullying demands of the role like a virgin martyr. Her performance had an unadorned artistry; it was singed with movie truth.

So identified with suffering women was Fawcett that she could lend suspense to another true-life horror story, the 1989 Small Sacrifices, in which she's a mother bringing her three injured children to a hospital, claiming they were attacked by a "bushy-haired man." (The woman had assaulted the children herself.) The actress snagged another Emmy nomination for this bold emotional about-face.

Not that Fawcett's allure decayed noticeably in her middle years. Her fine features and figure, augmented by the subtlest surgery, allowed her to defy age and gravity. That was evident when she posed nude for a portfolio in the December 1995 Playboy, the magazine's best-selling issue of the '90s, and in Robert Altman's Dr. T & the Women (2000) she played a mad housewife who walks naked through a mall fountain. She kept making films, and for The Apostle, as the frazzled wife of preacher Robert Duvall, she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award instead of a Golden Globe. That citation indicates how the once incandescent star had accommodated herself to renown of diminished wattage. In the public eye, she was still Farrah Fawcett, but the operative word was not still but was.

On occasion, she would emerge into notoriety, as in her 1997 gig with David Letterman, during which her chatter was so giggly and addled that it gave rise to reports, never substantiated, of drug use. (Early this year, after enduring Joaquin Phoenix's epic of incoherence, Letterman said, "We owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.") A post-Majors boyfriend, screenwriter James Orr, was charged with battering her for rejecting his marriage proposal. And she somehow endured a mostly on-again quarter-century relationship with the legendarily truculent Ryan O'Neal, once the charming star of Love Story, later the provocateur of so much domestic misery that he was dubbed "Hollywood's worst father" by the British Daily Mail. (Fawcett's and O'Neal's son Redmond has suffered numerous drug busts, one on April 5, just after his mother had gone to the hospital for the last time.)

Yet any actress — and Fawcett fooled her fans by becoming an excellent one — can find an arc of redemption through suffering. Fawcett was given a diagnosis of anal cancer in 2003 (the same year O'Neal came down with leukemia), and after a period of remission, it returned in 2007. She was the third of the original Charlie's Angels to suffer from cancer.

Long a board member of the national advisory council for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, she became an ardent activist for the Cancer Society. She put the news of her condition, and the remains of her celebrity, to worthy use. O'Neal hoped she would finally marry him, and she agreed, but at the end, she was too weak for the ceremony to be performed. A Catholic priest performed last rites a few hours before her death this morning in Santa Monica, Calif. O'Neal was with her.

Farrah Fawcett was no longer the Golden Girl, but she proved that living, and dying, with what she had become could have weight, value and an exemplary glow.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME 100.