Quotes of the Day

Boy, did the 1970s ever need Farrah Fawcett. Watergate and the Nixon resignation, soaring crime rates and gas prices — bad news everywhere — had the nation in need of a tonic, or a diversion, which is almost as therapeutic. Who could have guessed it would come in the trim form of a Texas blonde with a no-quit smile? That would be Farrah Fawcett, or Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as she called herself in her prime. (Not that there was ever a Farrah Fawcett Minor.)

And in her last months, before her death today at 62, Fawcett served as another important emblem: the gaunt, glamorous battler against anal cancer. She could have left her fans with memories of a white-hot celebrity as Charlie's blondest angel, a solid career playing besieged TV-movie heroines and a volatile private life that was almost always public. Instead, she waged a fight for cancer awareness in the best and bravest way she knew how: with a two-hour ABC TV special, widely seen in May, that showed her at home, in a California hospital and in a German clinic, often supported by family members — her longtime beau Ryan O'Neal, their son Redmond — who had shared tabloid headlines with her.

Ferrah Leni Fawcett (her first name a variation on the Arabic word for joy) was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. Voted Best Looking at her high school, she studied microbiology, then art, at the University of Texas, Austin. In Hollywood she got her first big role in the calamitous 1970 satire Myra Breckinridge, escaping unscathed and, for the most part, unnoticed. Until she was signed in 1976 for the ABC series Charlie's Angels, Fawcett was most visible as an icon of TV commercials: she made the Mercury Cougar pant and gave extra body to Wella Balsam shampoo. For Ultra-Brite Toothpaste, her smiling mouth was the ideal 24-hour product placement.

In 1973 she married future Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors and became Farrah Fawcett-Majors — one of those celebrity name changes (Rebecca Romijn Stamos, Meredith Baxter Birney) that virtually guarantee the couple will split. She and Majors separated in 1979 and divorced three years later.

Blond Angel
Charlie's Angels — a fantasy fashion show masquerading as a cop drama — was supposed to be an ensemble, with Fawcett supplementing the soft, russet beauty of Jaclyn Smith and the spikier, higher-IQ'd brunettishness of Kate Jackson. It didn't turn out that way. It's a toss-up whether Charlie's made her a star or she made it a hit, but within two months of the premiere episode, the show was on the cover of TIME, with Fawcett poised at the apex of the Angels triangle. She was the trio's breakout babe and an instant antidote to the decade's glums. The gurus of pop culture, and real people too, instantly leeched onto her outstanding but not intimidating good looks. Media madness for a new personality was rarely so sudden or endemic.

Publishers, and especially photographers, had a lot to work with. Fawcett's thin, animated lips and row upon row of immaculate Chiclet teeth conspired into a sunny, uncomplicated smile. Her body was athletic, her arms honey-glazed. And that wild mane of hair gave rise to the rumor that a lion at the San Diego Zoo had been secretly scalped. The whole package was alluring but not shamelessly sexy; a throwback to pinup queens of an earlier era, it signaled the freewheeling fun of the ultimate Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. If the big, bulky computers of the day could have programmed America's ideal of itself — shiny, confident, radiating pleasure, promising not so very much — Fawcett would have been the printout.

Cue Farrahmania. She was the decade's premier poster girl, with 8 million sold in a year. The number of baby girls named Farrah quickly spiked. A myriad of hairdos went Fawcett-feral. She signed a lucrative deal to front a line of Faberge perfume and accessories. She also furnished the press with aphorisms that might have been recycled from the Marilyn Monroe quote book ("The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to brains is that he can see better than he can think"). Some women might shrink from this fame tsunami; Fawcett expertly surfed it as if it were a Great Barrier Reef wave. Her talent, after all, was her ease in being watched, something she'd had much practice at. Her self-regard, which was well earned, found its perfect match in America's voyeurism.

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.

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.

• Richard Corliss
• Farrah Fawcett, dead of cancer at 62, came along just when we needed her. And she wouldn't quit