Farrah Fawcett turned out to be a whole lot more than The Poster and the hair.
But for almost anyone who was young in the 1970s, The Poster and the hair may be what endures the longest – Fawcett in a one-piece red bathing suit, looking over her right shoulder at the camera with piles of blondish hair framing blue eyes and a double-scoop smile.
She was an All-American Girl at a time when a country clawed bloody by scandal and war really needed one, and The Farrah Fawcett Poster became to late 20th century America what Betty Grable was to GIs in World War II.
Half the boys in the country had it on the wall and the other half didn’t need to, because they’d memorized it.
Fawcett, then known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, posed for The Poster in early 1976, a few months before she rose from minor TV star to major TV star as Jill Monroe on “Charlie’s Angels.”
Featuring two other equally beautiful women, Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, the show became an immediate hit and made them all stars, in addition to selling a lot of posters.
Acting wasn’t generally considered the reason for the show’s success, however, and when Fawcett left after the first season, there was every reason to expect she would soon fade away, another forgotten flavor of the month.
Six years later, after a divorce from Lee Majors and a series of flops that seemed to confirm she was a writeoff, she took on the off-Broadway play “Extremities” and got reviews that, sometimes in startled tones, praised her acting.
The rest of the country got the same feeling a year later, in 1984, when she starred in the TV film “The Burning Bed,” about a woman driven by years of abuse to kill.
Beyond respect as an actress, Fawcett had now achieved something even more difficult. Even while The Poster still hung on bedroom walls, she had made herself believable as the anti-Jill Monroe, a character with little hair and no glamour.
“The Burning Bed” won her an Emmy nomination, and she would later receive two more, along with six Golden Globe nominations.
She played Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, heiress Barbara Hutton. She played another less sympathetic killer, Diane Downs.
Finally the good roles ran out, and Fawcett took other paths. She posed for Playboy. Her June 1997 appearance on David Letterman’s show made headlines for the rambling, disjointed comments she always insisted were part of an elaborate gag.
She did some “reality” TV later, finally documenting the disease that killed her.
In the end she left a poster that cheered up a nation and a career that proves persistence and sheer hard work can get you a second chance.
That’s not a bad life’s work.
