Farrah Fawcett Biography

NAME: Farrah Fawcett

OCCUPATION: Actress, Pin-up

BIRTH DATE: February 02, 1947

DEATH DATE: June 25, 2005

EDUCATION: St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi, W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, University of Texas at Austin

Actress. Born Ferrah Leni Fawcett, on February 2, 1947, in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, Texas. She was the second daughter of Pauline, a homemaker, and Jim Fawcett, an oil field contractor. She later changed her name to Farrah.

She attended John J. Pershing Middle School in Houston, Texas, a school which is now the magnet program for fine arts. From 1962-65, Fawcett attended W.B. Ray High School, where she held the title of "Most Beautiful Student" for all four years.

In the fall of 1965, Fawcett enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin, where she planned to major in microbiology and joined the Delta Delta Delta sorority. The following year, a celebrity publicist asked her to go to California to work as a model. Initially, her parents forbade her to go, however, in the summer of 1968 they conceded and accompanied Fawcett on her trip out west to Hollywood. 

Her image – impossibly fresh-faced, toothsome and glowing with confidence and casual sex appeal – boosted her fledgling acting career and was almost as critical to her superstardom as her bouncy turn as one of a trio of “three little girls who went to the police academy…” in Aaron Spelling’s camp action series “Charlie’s Angels” (ABC, 1976-1981). At the peak of her fame and after only one season, she shockingly departed the series in 1977 with the intention of making a name in feature films, but the results were dismal at best and she was virtually written off as a 1970s relic, much like the pet rock. Determined to prove the naysayers wrong – that she was more than pearly whites and feathered hair – in the early 1980s, she began surprising fans and critics alike with a string of intense and unglamorous roles in plays, independent features and television movies like “The Burning Bed” (1984), “Extremities” (1985), and “Small Sacrifices” (1989). But Fawcett found it difficult to maintain the same level of quality in later projects, and a series of public appearances in which she appeared confused and/or heavily medicated did much to undo the goodwill generated by these mid-career efforts. In 2006 and 2007, Fawcett generated international headlines again with the revelation that she was undergoing treatment for anal cancer – the third of the three original Angels to confront this disease. Her long battle, poignantly documented in the public's last glimpse of the icon, "Farrah's Story" (NBC, 2009), came to an end on June 25, 2009, when Fawcett, 62, died in Los Angeles with family and friends by her bedside.