With co-stars Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith, she starred in the television series Charlie's Angels, playing private investigator Jill Munroe.

She received Emmy Award nominations for her role as a battered wife in The Burning Bed (1984) and for her portrayal of real-life murderer Diane Downs in Small Sacrifices (1989).

Although Fawcett weathered some negative press for a rambling appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in 1997, she garnered strong reviews that year for her role in the film The Apostle with Robert Duvall.

Finally, in the summer of 1968, Fawcett moved to Los Angeles, initially staying at the Hollywood Studio Club, with her parents' permission to "try her luck" in the entertainment industry.

[13][14] She began to appear in commercials for such products as Ultra Brite toothpaste, Noxzema skin cream, Max Factor cosmetics, Mercury Cougar automobiles, and Beautyrest mattresses, among others.

[5] She appeared in four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man with husband Lee Majors,[5] on The Dating Game[17] and S.W.A.T, and had a recurring role on Harry O alongside David Janssen as the title character's girlfriend, Sue.

The movie starred Fawcett (then billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors), Kate Jackson, and Jaclyn Smith as private investigators for Townsend Associates, a detective agency run by a reclusive multimillionaire whom the women had never met.

Voiced by John Forsythe, the Charles Townsend character presented cases and dispensed advice via a speakerphone to his core team of three female employees, whom he referred to as "Angels".

The program quickly earned a huge following, leading the network to air it a second time and approve production for a series, with the pilot's principal cast minus Ogden Stiers.

[32] Charlie's Angels was a global success, maintaining its appeal in syndication and spawning, particularly in the show's first three seasons, a cottage industry of peripheral products, including several series of bubble gum cards, two sets of fashion dolls, numerous posters, puzzles, and school supplies, novelizations of episodes, toy vans, and a board game, all featuring Fawcett's likeness.

[35][36] The following year she starred alongside an ensemble cast, which included Burt Reynolds, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. in the comedy The Cannonball Run (1981).

In 1983, Fawcett won critical acclaim for her role in the Off-Broadway stage production of the controversial play Extremities, written by William Mastrosimone.

[38] The following year, her role as battered wife Francine Hughes in the fact-based television movie The Burning Bed (1984) earned her the first of her four Emmy Award nominations.

[42] Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Fawcett had steadfastly resisted signing a release for nude photographs of her to be published in magazines, even though she had briefly appeared topless in the 1980 film Saturn 3.

[32] On June 5, 1997, Fawcett received negative commentary after she gave a rambling interview and appeared distracted on Late Show with David Letterman.

[45] Several years later in February 2009, Letterman ended an incoherent and largely unresponsive interview with Joaquin Phoenix by saying, "We owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.

[57] From 1997 to 1998, Fawcett was in a relationship with Canadian filmmaker James Orr,[58] who was the writer and producer of Man of the House, the Disney feature film in which she co-starred with Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

[71] There, Ursula Jacob prescribed a treatment including surgery to remove the anal tumor, a course of perfusion and embolization for her liver cancer by Claus Kiehling and Thomas Vogl in Germany, and chemotherapy in the US.

[76] A month later on May 7, Fawcett was reported as being critically ill, with Ryan O'Neal quoted as saying she was spending her days at home on an IV and often asleep.

They dispelled tabloid-fueled rumors, including suggestions that Fawcett had been in a coma, had dropped to 86 pounds (39 kg), and had even given up her fight against the disease or lost the will to live.

[77][81] At its premiere airing, the documentary was watched by nearly nine million people,[82] and it was re-aired on the broadcast network's cable stations MSNBC, Bravo and Oxygen.

Her initial producing partner—who had worked with her four years earlier on her reality series, Chasing Farrah—alleged that the editing of the program by O'Neal and Stewart was not in keeping with Fawcett's wishes to more thoroughly explore alternative methods of treatment of rare types of cancers such as her own.

[84] Fawcett died of anal cancer[85] at 9:28 a.m. PDT on June 25, 2009, at age 62, in Saint John's Health Center, Santa Monica, California, with O'Neal and Alana Stewart by her side.

CNN's Larry King Live planned a show exclusively about Fawcett that evening until Jackson's death caused the program to shift to cover both stories.

Friends and colleagues of Fawcett, including Ryan and Tatum O'Neal, Jane Fonda and film critic Roger Ebert,[99] publicly expressed their outrage at the oversight.

AMPAS executive director Bruce Davis noted that Fawcett had been recognized for her "remarkable television work" at the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards in September 2009.

"[100] The red one-piece bathing suit she wore in her famous 1976 poster was donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) on February 2, 2011.

[103] The iconic image of Farrah in a red swimsuit has been recreated in a limited edition Barbie doll with a gold chain and the girl-next-door locks.

Although Majors and Fawcett were both successful by that time, Weatherly used them as "characters"[106] in his song, about a failed actress who leaves Los Angeles and is followed by her boyfriend who cannot live without her.

Eventually the genders were swapped to a failed actor who leaves Los Angeles and is followed by his girlfriend, a train replaced the plane, and Houston was changed to Georgia.