Farrah Fawcett: The Pin-Up Who Undressed on Her Own Terms

I knew Farrah Fawcett first from Charlie's Angels. Growing up in Egypt, I saw her posters sold on the street, hung beside Bruce Lee's wounded Enter the Dragon poster. In Arabic her name is written فرح, Farah, and it means happiness. I think that helped make her so popular in Egypt: a beauty whose name was joy itself. Yet the Farrah I know best is not the girl on those street posters. It is the woman who came later, the one who posed for Playboy at 48, painted canvases with her own body, and walked naked into a fountain for Robert Altman. Her career runs alongside the whole history of screen nudity in America, from the end of the Production Code to the cautious 1990s. Unusually, she decided for herself when to undress.

Why Was Farrah Fawcett So Famous?

Category: biography, Charlie's Angels, the red swimsuit poster, 1970s sex symbol

Farrah Fawcett (1947–2009) became famous in 1976 through two images at once: Jill Munroe in ABC's Charlie's Angels and the red swimsuit pin-up poster, which sold more than 12 million copies. Her feathered "Farrah hair" became an international trend, and she later earned four Emmy and six Golden Globe nominations as a dramatic actress.

She was born Mary Ferrah Leni Fawcett on 2 February 1947 in Corpus Christi, Texas, and arrived in Hollywood in 1968 on a $350-a-week contract with Screen Gems, as her Wikipedia biography records. Commercials and guest spots came first, then a supporting role as Holly in Logan's Run (1976), the science-fiction film in which Jenny Agutter played Jessica 6, a role Heather Menzies took over in the 1977 television series. Charlie's Angels premiered as a series on 22 September 1976, and Fawcett quickly became its breakout star.

That fame was strangely brief and strangely total. She played Jill Munroe for only one season and left in the spring of 1977, which led to a lawsuit and a deal to return for six guest episodes. But the image had already escaped the show. The red swimsuit poster, shot by Bruce McBroom when she was 29, sold six million copies in its first year. She styled herself and wore her own suit, and she earned far more in poster royalties than from her salary on the show. The Smithsonian later took that swimsuit into the national collection.

Here is the paradox that runs through this article. In the decade when American films had just won the freedom to show everything, the most desired woman in the country showed almost nothing. Her sex appeal was a smile, a mane of hair and a one-piece swimsuit. The nudity came later, at an age when Hollywood expected her to cover up, and on her own terms.

The Red Swimsuit Poster: Sexy Without Showing Skin

Category: pin-up history, Pro Arts, Bruce McBroom, 1970s pop culture

Farrah Fawcett's most famous poster is the 1976 red swimsuit pin-up published by Pro Arts. She was 29 when Bruce McBroom photographed her in a red one-piece in front of a striped blanket. With more than 12 million copies sold, it is widely called the best-selling poster ever. No reliable figure for her own earnings from it has been published.

The poster was not an accident of fame; it was a negotiation. The Pro Arts poster company commissioned it, and Fawcett insisted on controlling which pictures were used. According to the history of the poster, she was unhappy with the work of two earlier photographers and suggested McBroom, whom she had worked with before. He shot her at the Los Angeles house she shared with her husband Lee Majors, and he later recalled the session for Time. There was no studio and no grand set: the striped blanket behind her was McBroom's own, the one he used to cover his car seats. He took several frames that day, and Fawcett herself chose the one that became the poster.

How Many Farrah Fawcett Posters Were Sold?

The Smithsonian puts the total at more than 12 million copies, and its National Museum of American History now holds the swimsuit itself, given by her estate in 2011. The image was copied so widely that Pro Arts went to court over it. A Canadian company that sold more than 90,000 unauthorised copies was ordered by an Ontario court in 1980 to pay more than 270,000 Canadian dollars.

How Much Money Did Farrah Fawcett Make From Her Poster?

No reliable source gives an exact sum, and figures that circulate online should be treated with suspicion. What is documented is that she controlled the image and that her royalties from it outstripped her television salary. For a 29-year-old actress in 1976, that was a rare kind of power.

A Clothed Pin-Up in the X Era

The timing is what makes the picture fascinating. Eight years earlier, the Production Code had given way to the MPAA ratings, and an X-rated film, Midnight Cowboy, had won the Oscar for Best Picture. American screens were full of bare bodies. Yet the decade's defining pin-up showed no nudity at all: a woman in a one-piece suit, smiling at the camera. In a 2003 essay in The Journal of Popular Culture, the scholar Chadwick Roberts argued that men had built Marilyn Monroe's image while Fawcett controlled her own. The poster sold the promise of sex, not the sight of it, and the person who decided how much to give was Farrah herself.

It belongs to a long line of swimsuit images that defined their eras, which Meeting Venus has traced in the hottest swimsuit models of all time. Few of them hold the same place in history. Fawcett held back for two decades, and when she finally undressed, it was by her own choice.

From the Production Code to X: The Culture Shift Behind Farrah

Category: film history, Hays Code, MPAA ratings, X rating, jiggle TV

Fawcett came to Hollywood in 1968, the year the Production Code was abandoned and the MPAA rating system took effect, on 1 November 1968. Films could now show nudity behind an R or X rating, but network television stayed clothed. That is why her 1970s fame was built on suggestion, not skin.

For more than three decades, American studio films lived under the Production Code, the self-censorship rules that the Hays Code history dates from 1930 to 1968. Among its bans was "any licentious or suggestive nudity – in fact or in silhouette". Meeting Venus's sister site has covered the wilder years before it was enforced in the Pre-Code era of Hollywood. By the mid-1960s the Code was cracking. The Pawnbroker (1964) became the first film with bare breasts to receive Code approval, as a "special and unique case". In 1966 MGM released Blowup without a seal at all, under a specially created company name.

1 November 1968: The Ratings Arrive

The replacement was not censorship but classification. The voluntary MPAA rating system took effect on 1 November 1968, the same year a 21-year-old Fawcett signed with Screen Gems. Films no longer had to be suitable for everyone; they only had to be labelled. Nudity became a question of which letter a film carried, and studio pictures of the 1970s used that freedom openly, a period traced in US studio movies of the 1970s.

How X Went From Art to Porn

In its early years, X meant adults only, not pornography; serious films were released with it. The trouble was legal. As the history of the X rating explains, the MPAA never trademarked the letter. Through the 1970s, pornographers stamped it on their own films, some adding more letters to make XX and XXX. The label that had once marked adult art became, in American culture, shorthand for porn.

Jiggle TV: The Clothed Counterpart

Television had no X and no R. Its answer to the new sexual freedom was what NBC executive Paul Klein called "jiggle television", a term he coined to attack ABC's strategy under Fred Silverman. It described shows that put young actresses in loose clothing, bikinis, swimsuits, négligées or a towel, and its emblem was Charlie's Angels. Klein called ABC's programmes "porn", playing on the decade's anxiety about pornography. Yet the shows themselves showed no nudity. Fawcett was the perfect star for that contradiction: the most desired body on television, never undressed.

What Came Next

The freedom did not last. In 1984 the MPAA created PG-13, and in September 1990 it replaced the tainted X with NC-17. Theatres, advertisers and video chains still largely refused to carry NC-17 films. Fawcett's own career would cross every stage of that arc, from a brief topless moment in an R-rated science-fiction film to a full nude scene past 50, at a time when Hollywood had grown wary of nudity. The next sections follow her through it.

The Early Films: Myra Breckinridge, Sunburn, Saturn 3 and The Cannonball Run

Category: filmography, nude scenes, Saturn 3, 1970s and early-1980s cinema

Farrah Fawcett did only one nude scene in her early films, and it is brief. In Saturn 3 (1980), made when she was 33, she has a short topless moment, and the film was rated R for "brief nudity". In Myra Breckinridge (1970), Sunburn (1979) and The Cannonball Run (1981), no reliable source records any nudity by her.

Her early big-screen career is a study in how much a sex symbol could promise without delivering. Each film sold her body as the main attraction, yet three of the four kept her clothed. The fourth showed so little that most audiences barely noticed.

Myra Breckinridge (1970): A Bit Part in an X-Rated Scandal

At 23, Fawcett played Mary Ann Pringle in Myra Breckinridge, the Gore Vidal adaptation that 20th Century Fox released with an X rating in 1970. The film is a monument to the brief moment when a major studio thought X could be mainstream. Its sexual explicitness belongs to Raquel Welch's title role and to the story, not to Fawcett, and there is no record of her undressing. She was a decorative newcomer in a film that has been called one of the worst ever made.

Sunburn (1979): Swimwear, Not Skin

Sunburn was one of her starring vehicles after Charlie's Angels, an Acapulco comedy-mystery for which she was paid $750,000. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that the romantic angle "seems almost extraneous". Despite the beach setting, no source records nudity by her, and the film was a commercial disappointment.

Saturn 3 (1980): The Topless Moment

Saturn 3, directed by Stanley Donen and released in the United States on 15 February 1980, cast her as Alex, who lives on a remote space station with her much older lover, Adam (Kirk Douglas), until Harvey Keitel arrives with a robot. It was rated R "for scenes of violence and brief nudity". Her own biography notes that she "briefly appeared topless" in it.

How willingly she did it is disputed. The screenplay was credited to the novelist Martin Amis, although Amis said most of the final script was written by Frederic Raphael. In a 2012 interview quoted by the Saturn 3 making-of archive, Amis said Fawcett did not want to disrobe and that Douglas, who insisted on nudity, was furious. This is Amis's account only. The same archive reports that a more provocative costume sequence was cut.

I saw Saturn 3 on a heavily censored VHS copy, with the nudity and the sex removed. Even without them, I see it as science-fiction exploitation: a film built to put the most famous pin-up of the decade in peril and in revealing clothes, in the wake of Star Wars and Alien.

A Kirk Douglas Aside: Still a Sex Symbol?

The nudity in Saturn 3 that reviewers remember is often not hers but Douglas's. Born in 1916, he was in his sixties, and reviews of the film note that he appears naked from behind. I read Douglas in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a star trying to show he was still a sex symbol. I had already seen him in that light in Holocaust 2000 (1977), Alberto De Martino's Italian-British answer to The Omen. I saw it in a cinema in Egypt when I was young, and later uncut on Italian television. In my memory he has nude rear scenes there too. The film haunted me, especially a scene of a man cutting his hands with glass. For more on the era's stranger science fiction, see this sci-fi case study.

The Cannonball Run (1981): Clothed and Nominated

In Hal Needham's The Cannonball Run, she played Pamela Glover, a tree-loving photographer whom the racers nickname "Beauty". It is an all-star road comedy led by Burt Reynolds, and no source records nudity by her. Her reward was a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Supporting Actress. By 1981 the pin-up career had run out of road, and the next move was not more skin but serious drama.

The Burning Bed and Extremities: Farrah the Serious Actress

Category: dramatic career, The Burning Bed, Extremities, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations

Farrah Fawcett became a serious actress between 1983 and 1986. She won acclaim off-Broadway in Extremities (1983), earned her first Emmy nomination for NBC's The Burning Bed (1984), and received a Golden Globe nomination for the 1986 film of Extremities. Her power on screen came from dropping the glamour, not from showing her body.

After The Cannonball Run, Fawcett did what pin-ups rarely manage: she changed the terms on which she was watched. In a 1986 New York Times profile, Stephen Farber wrote that she began to be taken seriously only when she "determinedly played against her glamorous image", daring "to look haggard and disheveled".

Extremities on Stage (1983)

The turn began in the theatre. In 1983 she replaced Susan Sarandon in William Mastrosimone's off-Broadway play Extremities, about a woman who turns the tables on the man who tries to rape her. Her biography records the critical acclaim, and she called the role "the most grueling, the most intense, the most physically demanding and emotionally exhausting" of her career.

The Burning Bed (1984): Her First Emmy Nomination

The Burning Bed, directed by Robert Greenwald, aired on NBC on 8 October 1984. Fawcett played Francine Hughes, the Michigan housewife who, after thirteen years of abuse by her ex-husband, set fire to the bed he was sleeping in, in 1977, and was tried for his murder. It became one of NBC's highest-rated television movies and received several Emmy nominations, including Fawcett's first. It was also the first television film to give viewers a nationwide 800 number for victims of domestic abuse.

PG-13 Arrives: A Middle Ground on the Big Screen

That same year, the cinema changed its rules again. The MPAA introduced PG-13 on 1 July 1984, after complaints about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins, and Red Dawn became the first film released with it. It created a middle ground between PG and R.

Extremities (1986): The Film

Robert M. Young's film of Extremities reunited Fawcett with her stage co-star James Russo. She plays Marjorie, a woman attacked in her own home by a would-be rapist, who overpowers him and holds him captive. In the Los Angeles Times, Sheila Benson called it a "serious, non-exploitative" adaptation that does not sensationalise the attacks. The Washington Post was harsher, and its rating note says the R-rated film "contains nudity". The role earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama.

I saw Extremities on VHS, probably in a censored copy. I saw it as her attempt to be a serious actress, to be judged by her acting instead of her looks.

The same instinct carried her to Small Sacrifices (1989), in which she played the convicted murderer Diane Downs and earned her second Emmy nomination. By the end of the decade she had joined the actresses who broke out of the roles Hollywood assigned them, a story Meeting Venus has told in celebrating trailblazing women in the film industry. The body she had kept mostly covered for two decades was still hers to reveal, and in the 1990s she would.

Playboy at 48 and 50: Farrah Fawcett Undresses on Her Terms

Category: Playboy, December 1995, July 1997, nudity and ageing, 1990s

Farrah Fawcett was 48 when her first Playboy pictorial appeared in the December 1995 issue, and 50 when she posed again for the July 1997 issue. After resisting nude photographs through the 1970s and 1980s, she chose to undress in her late forties and said she "wanted to show the female body as an art form".

For two decades the most famous pin-up in America had kept her clothes on for the camera. Then, at an age when the film industry usually expected actresses to retreat into mothers and wives, she did the reverse. Her biography notes that she had "steadfastly resisted" signing releases for nude photographs throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The December 1995 Playboy "caused a major stir".

December 1995: The First Pictorial at 48

The Chicago Tribune reported in October 1995 that the nude pictorial would appear in Playboy's "Gala Christmas Issue", on newsstands at Halloween. The 48-year-old told the magazine that her partner Ryan O'Neal, about whom the sister site has written in Ryan O'Neal, his Farrah and his films, was all for the spread; she was the one who needed convincing. "After 14 years, I still can't let him see me change clothes!" she said.

Even the business pages took notice. In September 1995 the Spokesman-Review pointed out that Fawcett was a director and shareholder of a newly public collectibles company. Its chairman, who had seen the pictures, said they were "tastefully done" and showed her on a beach. "When you have liberated women," he said, "you can't liberate them on one hand and clip their wings on another."

July 1997: Again at 50

She posed again at 50 for the July 1997 issue, which her biography says also became a top seller. This time the pictures came with a project of her own: she used her body to paint on canvas, something that had long been one of her ambitions. That story belongs to the next section.

What She Said: "An Art Form" and "a Renaissance"

She explained the choice in two ways. She told Texas Monthly that she "wanted to show the female body as an art form", and the writer added that she also wanted the world to see that even at fifty she looked as good as the younger stars of the day. She described the experience to an interviewer as "a renaissance": "I no longer feel ... restrictions emotionally, artistically, creatively or in my everyday life. I don't feel those borders anymore."

I know Farrah's Playboy issues, her body painting and her later nudity better than her early work. I believe that as she grew older she wanted to show that she still had a beautiful body and was still a sex symbol, alongside the younger actresses rising in those years.

Nudity Against the Grain of the 1990s

The timing gave the gesture its edge. In 1990 the MPAA had replaced X with NC-17, but many theatres refused to screen NC-17 films and many outlets refused to advertise or stock them, which made the new rating a commercial risk. A woman nearing fifty choosing to pose nude for the best-known men's magazine was the opposite of what Hollywood expected of her. She became a forerunner of the stars Meeting Venus has profiled in bold actresses over 60 who have posed nude. For another sex symbol of that era, see Bo Derek.

All of Me, Body Painting, Dalva and Dr. T: Nude by Choice

Category: Farrah Fawcett nude, All of Me, body painting, Dalva, Dr. T & the Women

Farrah Fawcett appeared nude on screen mostly in the second half of her career. In the 1997 Playboy video Farrah Fawcett: All of Me she painted on canvas with her nude body. In Robert Altman's Dr. T & the Women (2000), made when she was 53, she strips completely in a mall and ends up in a public fountain, her first fully nude film scene.

The Playboy pictorials were photographs. What followed was moving images, and each time the decision to undress was visibly hers.

Farrah Fawcett: All of Me (1997)

The video accompanied her July 1997 pictorial, and Entertainment Weekly reviewed it in August 1997. Part of it documents the 1995 photo sessions, with Fawcett explaining why she finally agreed, at 48, to pose nude. It is not a triumphant record. By the end of the shoot she is in tears, on the phone to someone close to her, saying, "I don't like my body, I don't like my hair." The reviewer found the moment "awful, painful, humiliating, creepy". Seen today, it is a rare glimpse of the doubt behind a sex symbol's confidence.

Body Painting: The Ambition Behind the Nudity

The heart of the 1997 project was art. According to her biography, the issue and its video showed Fawcett "actually using her own body to paint on canvas", which for years had been one of her ambitions. An ABC30 obituary adds that she also sculpted in the video, equally unclothed. She was not only the model; she was making the work.

Dalva (1996): Revealing, Not Confirmed Nude

Between the two Playboy issues came Dalva, an ABC television film based on Jim Harrison's novel, aired in March 1996. Fawcett plays a free-spirited woman searching for the son she gave up for adoption as a teenager. In the Los Angeles Times, Lynne Heffley described a "barely-there wardrobe" in which "tight," "short," "bra-less" and "revealing" were the operative words, and called the film "steamy". Variety thought it moved "quickly and intelligently". It was network television, and no reliable source confirms nudity, so Dalva is best described as sensual and revealing rather than nude.

Dr. T & the Women (2000): Nude in a Fountain at 53

In Robert Altman's comedy, Fawcett plays Kate, the wife of Richard Gere's Dallas gynaecologist. On a shopping trip, something in her cracks. Roger Ebert describes her wandering through the mall, "shedding clothes", and ending up nude in a fountain before she is institutionalised. Variety wrote that she was finally taken into custody after "prancing buck naked in a public fountain". Her biography calls it her first fully nude appearance.

She wanted the part badly. Interviewed by ABC News, she said she told her agents, "I'd do anything to work with this man." She shuttled by chartered jet between Altman's Texas set and another film in Nova Scotia, and Altman joked that she probably spent as much on the plane as he paid her. Of the nude scene, she said: "I think it was gutsy. [It was] hard but [it would have been] so much harder to do it if it wasn't justified."

I saw Dr. T & the Women, and I read the fountain scene as Farrah answering the passing years. Surrounded by a younger generation of actresses in the cast, she showed she was still a sex symbol in her own right.

Nude by Choice in a Cautious Era

What links these projects is choice. A woman who had resisted nude photographs for two decades now undressed in her own Playboy project, on canvas, and for a director she admired. She did it in the years after NC-17 had become a rating many theatres and retailers would not touch, and her nudity looked less like exploitation than authorship. How far screen nudity has travelled since, into streaming, is the subject of the sister site's deep dive into full frontal nudity on streaming services.

Lee Majors, Ryan O'Neal and the Men in Farrah Fawcett's Life

Category: relationships, Farrah Fawcett husband, Ryan O'Neal, Redmond O'Neal

Farrah Fawcett was with Ryan O'Neal when she died. They were together from 1979, separated in 1997, and reunited in 2001, staying together until her death in 2009. Her only husband was Lee Majors, married to her from 1973 to 1982. Majors and Fawcett had no children; her only child, Redmond, born in 1985, is her son with O'Neal.

The men in her life mirrored the arc of her career: the television star she married young, the film star she loved for most of her adult life, and two later relationships that ended in court records and contested memories. Her biography sets out the facts plainly.

Lee Majors (Married 1973–1982)

Fawcett began dating Lee Majors in the late 1960s and married him in 1973, when he was about to become the star of The Six Million Dollar Man. She appeared in four episodes of that series. They separated in 1979 and divorced in 1982, and they had no children. Throughout the marriage, even after the separation, she was billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, the name on her Charlie's Angels credits and on Sunburn.

Ryan O'Neal (1979–1997, 2001–2009)

In 1979 she became involved with Ryan O'Neal, the star of Love Story. They never married. Their son, Redmond James Fawcett-O'Neal, was born on 30 January 1985. The relationship was not easy. In 1994 she told TV Guide, "Sometimes Ryan breaks my heart, but he's also responsible for giving me confidence in myself."

They reunited in 2001, and he stayed beside her through her cancer. Days before her death, the Los Angeles Times and Reuters reported O'Neal saying that she had agreed to marry him once she felt strong enough. Her living trust, last amended in 2007, did not name him. She left $4.5 million in a trust for Redmond, as People reported.

James Orr (1997–1998)

Between the two periods with O'Neal, she dated the Canadian filmmaker James Orr, writer and producer of the Disney comedy Man of the House (1995), in which she co-starred with Chevy Chase. The relationship ended when Orr was convicted of beating her during a 1998 fight, and he received probation, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Greg Lott: The College Boyfriend

Greg Lott was a University of Texas Longhorns football player whom she dated as an undergraduate. After her death he claimed, in an account reported by ABC News, that they had rekindled their romance in 1998 and stayed together until 2009, and that O'Neal kept him from seeing her in her final days. That is Lott's account, and he called her public relationship with O'Neal "Hollywood fantasy". Her trust did leave him $100,000.

What Was Farrah Fawcett Trying to Prove?

Category: legacy, ageism, anal cancer, Farrah's Story, death of Farrah Fawcett

Farrah Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006. It returned in 2007 and spread to her liver, and she filmed her treatment for the NBC documentary Farrah's Story (2009). She died in Santa Monica on 25 June 2009, aged 62, hours before Michael Jackson. Across four decades, she proved that a sex symbol could control her own image and keep it past fifty.

A Case Study in Control

Put her career against the history of American screen nudity, and a pattern appears. When the ratings arrived and films could show nearly anything, she became the decade's great pin-up without undressing, and she chose the frame of her own poster. In Saturn 3 she allowed only a brief glimpse. When she proved herself as an actress, she did it by stripping away glamour, not clothes. And when the 1990s had turned cautious and Hollywood expected women her age to disappear, she undressed fully, for Playboy, for her own canvases and for Altman. The question was never only how much of her body the public could see. It was who decided.

Read that way, what she was trying to prove was twofold. First, that her body and her image belonged to her, in the X era, in the PG-13 era and in the NC-17 era alike. Second, that desirability does not expire at forty, an argument that still has to be made, as the Meeting Venus portrait of actresses over 60 challenging ageism shows.

The Cancer and Farrah's Story

Her biography records that she was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006 and treated with chemotherapy and surgery. On her 60th birthday, 2 February 2007, the Associated Press reported her cancer-free. By May 2007 it had returned as stage IV cancer that had spread to her liver. She turned the camera on herself one last time. Farrah's Story, filmed with her friend Alana Stewart, aired on NBC on 15 May 2009 and drew nearly nine million viewers. It also brought controversy, as a former producing partner alleged the final edit did not reflect her wish to explore alternative treatments more fully. After her death, it earned her a fourth Emmy nomination, as a producer.

25 June 2009

Fawcett died at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica on the morning of 25 June 2009, at 62, with Ryan O'Neal and Alana Stewart beside her. A few hours later, Michael Jackson died, and the coverage of his death largely overshadowed hers. The neglect continued the following March, when the Academy left her out of its "In Memoriam" montage, an omission that drew public criticism.

Her Legacy

Two institutions now carry her name and image. The Smithsonian collected objects from her career, including the swimsuit from the poster, for the National Museum of American History. The Farrah Fawcett Foundation supports cancer research, patient assistance, prevention and HPV awareness. The great pin-up of the 1970s became, in the end, a museum piece and a cancer charity, and a lasting example of a woman who decided for herself when to be seen.

Conclusion: Farrah Fawcett, Happiness on Her Own Terms

Category: conclusion, personal view, legacy

Farrah Fawcett's story is the story of American screen nudity told through one woman: clothed and adored in the permissive 1970s, serious in the 1980s, and nude by her own choice in the cautious 1990s and 2000s. At every stage, she decided how much of herself to show.

For me she began with Charlie's Angels, and with the posters sold on the streets of Egypt, where her name, فرح, simply means happiness. Years later, the Farrah I came to know best was the one who refused to fade: the woman of the Playboy issues, the body painting and the fountain in Dr. T & the Women. As she grew older, she showed she was still a sex symbol, and she did it on her own terms.

She went from a poster that showed nothing to nude scenes that she chose, and both were acts of control. That, more than the hair or the swimsuit, is why she still matters.

Farrah Fawcett FAQ

Category: frequently asked questions

What happened to Farrah Fawcett?

Farrah Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006. It returned in 2007 and spread to her liver, and she documented her treatment in the NBC film Farrah's Story (2009). She died in Santa Monica on 25 June 2009, aged 62.

Who was Farrah Fawcett in a relationship with when she died?

She was with Ryan O'Neal. They were together from 1979 to 1997 and again from 2001 until her death, and O'Neal was at her bedside when she died. They never married.

Did Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett have a child together?

No. Fawcett and Lee Majors were married from 1973 to 1982 and had no children. Her only child, Redmond, born in 1985, is her son with Ryan O'Neal.

Why was Farrah Fawcett so famous?

In 1976 she became famous twice over: as Jill Munroe in ABC's Charlie's Angels and through her red swimsuit poster. Her feathered hair became an international trend, and she later earned four Emmy nominations, the first for The Burning Bed.

What is the most famous poster of Farrah Fawcett?

Her most famous poster is the 1976 red swimsuit pin-up published by Pro Arts and photographed by Bruce McBroom at her Los Angeles home, in front of his own striped blanket. Fawcett chose the frame herself.

How old was Farrah Fawcett in the famous poster?

She was 29 when Bruce McBroom photographed her for the 1976 red swimsuit poster.

How much money did Farrah Fawcett make off her poster?

No reliable source gives an exact figure. Her poster royalties are reported to have far exceeded her salary on Charlie's Angels.

How many Farrah Fawcett posters were sold?

The poster sold six million copies in its first year and, according to the Smithsonian, more than 12 million in total, which makes it widely called the best-selling poster ever.

How old was Farrah Fawcett when she posed for Playboy?

She was 48 for her first Playboy pictorial, in the December 1995 issue, and 50 when she posed again for the July 1997 issue, which also featured her painting on canvas with her body.

Did Farrah Fawcett do nude scenes?

Yes, but rarely. She appeared briefly topless in Saturn 3 (1980), and in Robert Altman's Dr. T & the Women (2000) she strips in a mall and ends up in a fountain, her first fully nude film scene. She also painted nude in the 1997 Playboy video Farrah Fawcett: All of Me.