Farrah Fawcett, 62, golden-haired sex symbol of the late 1970s most remembered for her appearance on bedroom posters and the detective series "Charlie's Angels" and who later found a niche portraying troubled women in made-for-television dramas, died today at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., of cancer.

Farrah Fawcett Dies at 62Golden-haired actress, most remembered for her role on the detective series "Charlie's Angels," dies after long battle with cancer. (Photo: Reuters)

• Remembering Farrah Fawcett | Q&A, 2 ET
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Ms. Fawcett was a Texas-born college dropout who parlayed success as a model for toiletries such as Ultra Brite toothpaste and Wella Balsam shampoo into a viable acting career.

Still a relative unknown, she achieved two iconic roles at the same time in 1976. On Wednesday nights, she was Jill Munroe, the blond Angel on the ABC detective drama produced by Aaron Spelling. The rest of the week, she was the star attraction on a poster that sold a record 12 million copies. Haloed by the curls of her impossibly buoyant curly hair, wearing a red swimsuit that left little to the imagination, she entered the dreams of adolescent boys everywhere and brought women into hair salons to copy her style.

Thanks to her radiant sexuality, Ms. Fawcett became the breakout star of "Charlie's Angels," appearing in such suggestive episodes as "Angels in Chains," where she and her beautiful co-detectives -- played by Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith -- went undercover on a chain gang. The show's tone led to its nickname: "Jiggle TV."

As Ms. Fawcett said, "When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra."

In 1973, she married Lee Majors, soon to star in "The Six Million Dollar Man," and acquired the name she would use in the "Charlie's Angels" title sequence, Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

She left "Charlie's Angels" after one season to pursue a movie career and immediately was served with a lawsuit from Spelling and producer Leonard Goldberg for breach of contract, which was resolved only when she agreed to make a series of guest appearances on the show over its next several seasons.

Meanwhile, Ms. Fawcett appeared in an unsuccessful star vehicle, "Somebody Killed Her Husband," a 1978 film with Jeff Bridges known in the industry as Somebody Killed Her Career. She also was Burt Reynolds's love interest in the comedy "The Cannonball Run" (1981).

But it was in made-for-television movies that she began reinventing herself, often to critical acclaim.

Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote of Ms. Fawcett's "strenuous and superb performance" playing a battered wife out for revenge in "The Burning Bed" (1984). She found a niche as vulnerable women in troubled or abusive relationships, such as "Extremities" (1986) and "Small Sacrifices" (1989).

She also portrayed photographer Margaret Bourke-White, Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld and heiress Barbara Hutton in made-for-television productions.

Mary Farrah Leni Fawcett was born Feb. 2, 1947, in Corpus Christi, where her father started a pipeline construction company. She was an art major at the University of Texas at Austin and began modeling for a local clothing store. She was voted one of the 10 most beautiful women on campus, and Hollywood publicist David Mirisch urged her to quit school for a career in show business.

At first reluctant to leave college, she met with almost immediate success as a model and received guest roles on television shows such as "I Dream of Jeannie" and "The Partridge Family" and films including "Myra Breckinridge" (1970) and "Logan's Run" (1976). She also appeared with her then-husband, Majors, on "The Six Million Dollar Man" and on other shows produced by Goldberg and Spelling before "Charlie's Angels" made her a national name.

Her marriage to Majors also foundered, and she began a long relationship with actor Ryan O'Neal, with whom she had a son, Redmond. Survivors include her son, whose drug use was well documented by tabloids in recent years.

Starting in the 1990s, she attempted to recapture her status as a sex symbol. She underwent plastic surgery and appeared nude in Playboy photo shoots as well as a 1997 Playboy video called "All of Me."

That same year, she turned in a memorable supporting performance as the wife of Robert Duvall's philandering minister in "The Apostle." Critic Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times praised her by noting how she disappeared convincingly into the role, adding she was "surprising" and "gaunt, almost unrecognizable."

Mostly she was followed by the tabloids for her troubled personal life, including several accounts of domestic abuse by boyfriends. She also appeared incoherent as a guest on "The Late Show With David Letterman" in 1997.

In 2005, she was once again the star of her own show, "Chasing Farrah," a reality-style program on the channel TVLand that followed her life with cameras. It was quickly overshadowed by her diagnosis with cancer the following September. At the end of 2007, she announced plans to reunite with the videographer of "Chasing Farrah" to televise her cancer battle in another documentary, "A Wing and a Prayer."

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