Actress Farrah Fawcett, 62, the all-American, pin-up poster girl of the 1970s, whose tousled, blonde mane of hair and mega-watt smile seduced the nation and transformed her into a national pop-culture icon, died today at a Santa Monica hospital following a three-year battle with cancer.
"In the face of excruciating pain and uncertainty, I never lost hope and it never occurred to me to stop fighting – not ever," she once said in a statement to fans.
Fawcett's long-time partner Ryan O'Neal, 69, told People magazine Thursday, "She's gone. She now belongs to the ages ... She's now with her mother
and sister and her God. I loved her with all my heart. I will miss her
so very, very much. She was in and out of consciousness. I talked to
her all through the night. I told her how very much I loved her. She's
in a better place now."
O'Neal, himself a 1970s leading man and the father of Fawcett's son, Redmond O'Neal, has been Fawcett's on-again, off-again companion for many years.
"It's a love story," he told People. "I just don't know how to play this one. I won't know this world without her. Cancer is an insidious enemy."
Fawcett, once a spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society, was diagnosed with anal cancer in September 2006. She issued a defiant written statement shortly afterward: "Throughout the journey of my life, I have maintained a strong faith in the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity. I deeply believe in one's own positive will to overcome even the most daunting challenges. I am resolutely strong and I am determined to bite the bullet and fight the fight."
Four months later, she declared herself cancer-free, only to have the disease return in May 2007. Scans showed not only had it recurred, it had metastasized to her liver. Last year, an employee at the UCLA Medical Center was disciplined for accessing Fawcett's medical records.
Fawcett recently returned to the U.S. from the Alpenpark Clinic in Germany where she sought treatments on six separate occasions over a two-year period. She was hospitalized briefly upon her arrival home and underwent what her doctor, cancer specialist Lawrence Piro, told Fox News was a "minor procedure" that "led to a small amount of bleeding into a muscle in her abdominal wall."
"At about the halfway point in our trips the news started to get darker
and darker and darker," Ryan O'Neal said. "The hope started to fade.
But not for Farrah. She continued fighting. There was always a courage
there, and a quiet dignity. Farrah never changed. I fell in love with
her all over again because of how she handled this."
The actress documented her medical experiences on film and shared the footage with entertainment television shows in early 2008. "Farrah's Story," a two-hour television special based on the video footage, aired on NBC May 15. The documentary follows the star through personal moments, highs and lows, and several trips to Germany. The "Charlie's Angels" star began to chronicle her struggle after taking a handheld camera to the doctor's appointment during which she found out her cancer had returned, friend and producer Alana Stewart told People.
"Of all the things I've ever hoped for in my life, finding a doctor to
surgically remove my anal cancer did not even make the top one million
on my list,” Fawcett said in "Farrah’s Story." "But now it was
number one – number one as in primary cancer, meaning it was the first
in and, for that reason, it needed to be the first out. Because it was
this peanut-sized tumor that had sent its army of mutant cells into my
liver. And it would continue to send reinforcements into any organ into
my body unless someone did something to stop it."
Fawcett's son Redmond, who is currently in a Los Angeles jail equipped to serve drug offenders, was briefly released in late April so he could visit his ailing mother, and he is seen in the documentary climbing into his mother's bed to curl up beside her while she is sleeping.
Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson and Fawcett's father, Jim Fawcett, 91, also appear on camera.
And in "Farrah’s Story," the famous beauty comments: "Cancer is a disease that is
mysterious, headstrong and makes its own rules. And mine, to this
date, is incurable. I know that everyone will die eventually, but I do
not want to die of this disease. I want to stay alive. So I say to
God, because it is, after all, in his hands. It is seriously time for
a miracle."
Texas Beauty Queen Goes Hollywood
Farrah Leni Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1947, the younger of two daughters of Pauline Evans Fawcett, a homemaker, and James Fawcett, an oil field contractor.
Voted "best looking" by her classmates, she graduated from W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi in 1965. She attended the University of Texas at Austin and was a member of the Delta Delta Delta sorority before quitting college to try her luck in Hollywood.
Within weeks of her arrival in Los Angeles, she was dating TV actor Lee Majors. After their marriage in 1973, she was billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors.
The late '60s and early '70s saw Fawcett doing TV guest spots and commercials for Ultra-Brite toothpaste, Wella Balsam shampoo and Noxzema shaving cream. In 1970, she won her first major role in the film adaptation of the Gore Vidal novel Myra Breckinridge. Fawcett also appeared occasionally on Majors' show the "Six Million Dollar Man" and in 1974 she landed a small recurring role on the cop series "Harry O."
But Fawcett was still a relative unknown when in 1976, famed TV producer Aaron Spelling cast her for "Charlie's Angels," in which she played Jill Munroe, the tanned, glamorous undercover detective.
Starring alongside actresses Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, Fawcett was the hit show's top attraction. Her "feathered" hairstyle was emulated by millions of women and adolescent girls. Her pin-up poster, for which she posed in a red swimsuit, adorned millions of bedroom walls.
The poster catapulted Fawcett to icon status.
It appeared in Life Magazine as one of the iconic images that defined the '70s and remains the best-selling poster of all time, surpassing even those of Betty Grable and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. In 2007, G.Q. Magazine named the poster "the most influential piece of men's art of the last 50 years." A copy hangs in the Smithsonian Museum (along with Fonzie's jacket and Archie Bunker's chair).
Despite the celebrity she gained from "Charlie's Angels," Fawcett quit the show at the end of its first season. After being sued for breach of contract, she made a few guest appearances in subsequent years. She also had small roles in well-known films including 1981's "The Cannonball Run" and the 1976 science-fiction classic "Logan's Run."
She and Majors separated in 1979 and later divorced.
The actress sought to downplay her sex symbol status through meatier roles in the 1980s. She earned critical acclaim for her performance as a domestic violence survivor in 1984's "The Burning Bed," for which she received the first of three Emmy nominations – her last in 2003 for her role in "The Guardian." She also appeared in Playboy magazine in 1995, at the age of 48. It was the magazine's best-selling issue of that decade.
In the three decades since Fawcett seduced the nation with her brilliant smile and red swimsuit – years marked by professional highs and lows, as well as her older sister Diane's death from lung cancer in 2001 and her mother Pauline's death at 91 in 2005 – the public remained enchanted by the all-American sex symbol.
"I've never understood why people are interested in anything that I do. Until now.
"As much as I would have liked to have kept my cancer private, I now realize that I have a certain responsibility to those who are fighting their own fights and may be able to benefit from learning about mine," said Fawcett.