Following her time on Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett became a huge celebrity; her distinctive hairdo and “pin-up” status only contributed to increase her notoriety.
Fawcett went through difficult times in her life at the same period. She had a multi-million dollar lawsuit pending against her former company, and she was known to have occasionally tangled love lives.Her turbulent relationship with actor Ryan O’Neal in the 1990s was nothing short of a disaster.
The saddest aspect of all, though, was that she ultimately made the decision to end her relationship with him due to a very unexpected finding.What you need to know about cult favorite actress Farrah Fawcett is here!
On February 2, 1947, Farrah Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Texas. She was the second child of Pauline and Jim; Pauline was a stay-at-home mom, and Jim was an oil field contractor.At birth, Farrah was given the name Ferrah, which is Arabic for joy. Later, she made the decision to alter it.
Fawcett would go on to become one of the most attractive “golden girls” of her generation.Her mother, Pauline, told the Texas Monthly that when she brought Farrah into a store, shoppers would pause their cart and exclaim, “She looks like an a-n-g-e-l.” Pauline further asserted that neighboring kids frequented their home expressly to see her.
For Farrah, it wasn’t all good news, either. Even while her mother appreciated that everyone admired her daughter, it subsequently caused her problems. Farrah was aware of her beauty, yet even that presented challenges for her.
“I always felt so self-conscious,” Farrah’s mother Pauline recalled the actress saying. “I wanted people not to look at me because so many people kept looking at me.”
There’s no disputing that Fawcett’s appearance became a significant aspect of her life, even though appearances aren’t everything. She won the “Most Beautiful” award from her high school peers three years in a row. Then, in 1965, she relocated to Austin to attend the University of Texas, and during her first year of college, she was once more chosen as the “Most Beautiful” student.
Fawcett attended the University of Texas to study both microbiology and art. But a year after she started, a new kind of career started to take off. A picture of Farrah was sent to Hollywood PR expert David Mirisch after she was selected as one of the “Ten Most Beautiful” women at the University of Texas. He called her because he felt she was gorgeous and wanted to persuade her to go to Los Angeles so he could help her start a modeling career there.
Now, Mirsch had a number of other well-known clients, such as Patt Boone and Perry Como. He called Farrah while she was still in class to persuade her to drop out and move to Hollywood. Mirisch persisted despite Fawcett’s requests for him to speak with her father.
After completing her junior year, Farrah finally came to a conclusion. A photographer for the Texas Student Publications took her picture in a park in Texas. Her intention was to visit Los Angeles for a brief period of time to get a taste of the city before returning to school for her senior year.
As we now know, that never happened.
After relocating to Los Angeles, Fawcett quickly got a deal with Screen Gems, which reportedly paid her roughly $360 per week. She started performing work for Max Factor and Mercury Cougar Cars, as well as advertisements for Wela Balsam and Ultra-Brite toothpaste.
Farrah was a talented actor as well as a fantastic model. After a few more assignments as a model, which involved posing for numerous magazine covers, she started landing acting roles in the middle of the 1960s. Soon after, she started starring in television advertisements.
She initially appeared in television series such as I Dream of Jeannie, The Partridge Family, and The Flying Nun.
At that time, Farrah was on a steady rise towards fame. Then, everything changed in 1976, as she became world-famous thanks to two jobs.
Farrah was cast in the 1975 television movie Murder on Flight 502 by renowned television producer Aaron Spelling. He had been quite taken with her acting after that. After that, he made the decision to put her in a brand-new television series called Charlie’s Angels, which would feature three female detectives as its main characters.
“We were looking for the California beach-girl type, and Farrah was perfect for that,” he wrote in his 1996 memoir A Prime-Time Life. “She was drop-dead gorgeous and the living image of the beautiful L.A blonde in tennis shorts or a bathing suit.”
The program premiered in September 1976, and despite some harsh criticism, the audience adored it. Alongside Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith, Farrah played the role of agent Jill Munroe on the show. She was mostly responsible, in Spelling’s opinion, for Charlie’s Angels’ positive reception among viewers.
“We thought about changing it for a moment in the beginning, and had we been doing a traditional cop show, we would have,” he wrote. “But her hair helped make the show. It became one of our signatures.”
Like her father, Lisa Marie Presley is a musician. She has continued to be in the public eye while building her own musical career. Lisa has been married four times and has gone through three divorces. Her marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage have garnered a lot of media attention.
“Her feathered, high-lighted, layered phenomenon was a work of art that looked as if it had just come out of the sea and had been tossed by the wind into a state of careless perfection. Farrah’s hair was emblematic of women in the first stage of liberation – strong, confident, and joyous – before the reality of mortgage payments and single parenthood set in,” the Times wrote, as quoted by Texas Monthly.
However, Farrah had had enough of Charlie’s Angels after just one season. She believed that the lengthy production schedule and the screenplay both needed improvement. She therefore deemed her contract void and fled.
A $7 million contract breach case was then filed against her. Fawcett later consented to return for six more episodes as part of a settlement. She only made an appearance in 29 of the 115 episodes, yet she was still the big star.
“I left Charlie’s Angels because I felt creatively stifled,” Farrah said.
“Now, when I go back to Charlie’s Angels, it is much better. I have a chance to work with the writers on the script and the director. I can treat it like a business, I could not do that before, I was hurt at first because I was sued.”
She added: “I read things in the press that hurt, like things that girls had said. All of that is past now. We are all friends again. I feel much better.”
