Farrah Fawcett: Land of the Farrahs

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2020/09/15/...f-the-farrahs/

Farrah Fawcett was an icon. If you were alive in the 1970’s, you remember the image of Fawcett smiling broadly in a red bathing suit on the best-selling poster of all times. Fawcett became a mega-star on the first season of “Charlie’s Angels” but her career suffered when she left the show and her contract prohibited her from making the jump to movies. The following decade, Fawcett enjoyed a comeback with gritty roles that shred her angelic image.

But things were complicated for Farrah. This profile from the September 2000 issue of Movieline magazine came near the end of her career before she was diagnosed with cancer which would claim her life. At the time, Fawcett was dealing with PR disasters thanks to an infamous appearance of the David Letterman show as well as an arrest.

When her marriage to Lee Majors (“The Six Million Dollar Man”) ended in 1982 and when she began cohabitating with Ryan O’Neal (with whom she lived for 17 years and had a son), she made headlines. Whole articles were written about why she chopped her hair off in 1983. In this environment, it was really impossible for her to be taken seriously as an actress. Hollywood producers had chased her for movies when she was an “Angel,” but because of her “Charlie’s” contract, she lost out on starring in the 1978 megahit Foul Play. The films she did make–Logan’s Run, Somebody Killed Her Husband, Sunburn, Saturn 3, The Cannonball Run–were pretty terrible. In a bold move to establish credibility, she took the rate of a woman who exacts revenge on the man who raped her in a 1983 off-Broadway production called Extremities (which in 1986 was made into a feature film, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe). In 1984, she played a vengeful battered wife in the critically admired TV movie The Burning Bed and was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe. She won more Globe nominations for Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story (1986) and Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story (1987) and another Emmy nod for Small Sacrifices (1989).

In 1995, when it looked as if Fawcett would continue to live a quiet life cranking out respected work in TV movies, things got odd. She posed nude, at 48, for a pictorial in Playboy’s Christmas issue. Two years later, she showed up again in Playboy and starred in and coproduced Farrah Fawcett: All of Me, a Playboy pay-per-view special (later released on video) in which she used her naked body as a paintbrush. Then she made a now-infamous appearance on David Letterman’s “Late Show,” in which her spacey behavior had many believing she was either stoned or drunk. Her personal life was also making news. Months earlier she had split from Ryan O’Neal and started seeing James Orr, the director of her 1995 Chevy Chase comedy Man of the House. But as soon as that relationship began, Fawcett also started a relationship with the LAPD. In May of 1997, Orr’s friend Kristen Amber Citron claimed that Fawcett stole $72,000 worth of her clothes from Orr’s house (the police investigation failed to substantiate the charge). Things looked up when in early 1998 Fawcett received glowing reviews for her turn in The Apostle, but then she had a scuffle with Orr, which resulted in his arrest. Though today Fawcett, 53, says, “This ‘life’ stuff just keeps on comin’, you know?” her career is back on track. She’s currently shooting Jewel, a TV film about a mother dealing with a Down’s syndrome child, and Robert Altman’s new film Dr. T and the Women, in which she plays a woman who withdraws into childlike behavior because she is loved and watched too much, is due out this fall.