The best-selling poster of the 70s

Farrah Fawcett didn’t have to speak or move at all to be a sex symbol. There she was on my brother’s wall, as she was on literally millions of American walls in the 1970s beaming from her iconic poster – the best selling poster of the decade. Yes, there was also Charlie’s Angels, the silly femme cop she she starred on for one season with Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith before ankling for greener pastures.

She left in part because of the poster-like way she was treated as an actress and many in Hollywood thought the joke was on her, reinforced by appearances in crappy movies like the execrable Saturn 5 with Kirk Douglas and breezy lightweight fare like Cannonball Run.

She spent the 80s proving critics wrong, first on stage in Extremities as a rape victim and then on TV in The Burning Bed, a true story about an abused wife’s revenge in the days before Lifetime made such stories commonplace. Fawcett won an Emmy and set the gold standard for other actors who wanted to revive their careers by being taken seriously.

She worked steadily afterwards, most notably in Robert Duvall‘s The Apostle but would become more associated with her nude body paintings for Playboy and a strange appearance on David Letterman‘s show.

She was also well known for her rocky relationships – initially with Husband Lee Majors, the star of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy – the Major’s sung theme song of which slyly made reference to how he’d “been seen with Farrah.” By then the song’s lament that the other guy get’s the girl rang all-too true as his buddy Ryan O’Neal stole her heart.

Though they never married their on and off relationship lasted throughout the rest of her life, and included kids who had their own troubles to sort out.

When Fawcett’s cancer was diagnosed as returned and metastasizing, the hospital who treated her leaked the information to the press, leading to a successful lawsuit that reinforced the sanctity of patient records.

Fawcett decided to document her experience, inviting cameras to document the last several months of her life in an NBC special called Farrah’s Story, that pushed the bounds of reality television, perhaps not for the better. Cancer survivors did appreciate her candor though, but she received criticism from some quarters for not talking about the HPV vaccine.

Here’s Fawcett on Charlie’s Angels along with Ron Burgundy: