#Alice Munro controversy

[mandirapattnaikwriter]

why am I pulling out of social media? (and it has nothing to do with us-elections!)

GROWING A SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE: HOW IMPORTANT IS IT FOR A LITMAG WRITER? I am sure most of you are on social media and having a ‘Following’. I am on Twitter and Instagram but not on Facebook. Five years ago, when I started out as a ‘litmag’ writer (aka had my first publication in an international literary magazine), I was told having a social media presence would be a pre-requisite. I wasn’t on…

[grandhotelabyss]

If it magically turned out that the Oxfordians where right, would it shatter your view of reality, like people who say that the earth being flat would mean everything about the world would be tupsy turvy?

Or would you go "guess I was wrong, anyways..."

No, my view of reality, tenuous as it is already, would not be shaken by the news that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, though it might be damaged slightly by the time-travel involved in his getting that famous allusion about equivocation into Macbeth—a topical reference to a news story that broke the year after he died. (Maybe John Dee looked in his magic mirror and told de Vere what the future held.) But if so apparently cruel and crude a man were Shakespeare—see the Art of Darkness pod for an introduction to a character even less appealing than a litigious and provincial parvenu—it would only prove my controversial point that personally "problematic" writers are often better qua writers than non-problematic ones, much against the bias of our moralistic time. (Surely, Alice Munro's having behaved worse behind the scenes than Roth or Updike ever did should make us do away with this moralism forever. Considering how much less lively her style is than Roth's or Updike's, this case might, on second thought, challenge my provocation. But I digress...) As I think I said in The Invisible College episode on "Scylla and Charybdis," I'm more opposed to the Oxford thesis specifically than I am to alternative Shakespearean authorship theories generally; I see a poetic or historical worth to the Baconian theory and the Mary Sidney theory and the Marlowe-faked-his-death theory. I can't get around Oxford's bad poetry, though; it's like being told that Rod McKuen actually wrote Gravity's Rainbow. Above all, my appreciation and interpretation of Shakespeare's work is not primarily biographical, so I think I would come away unscathed by the "information."

[parkpavilion]

Long Live the King

As millions around the world mourned the passing of a venerable queen, another monarch, far less famous, slipped more quietly into death. King Xavier I, reigning monarch of Redonda, died in Madrid, Spain, far from his fiefdom, a tiny outcropping of rock near Antigua and Barbuda in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. He was there in spirit, though, since his kingdom had always existed more solidly in the minds of his followers than in any physical location. 

If anything about his story sounds familiar, it may be because I wrote about Redonda in a recent bookstore newsletter, highlighting the imminent publication of the first comprehensive study of this mysterious, ineffable place. The monarchical micronation was created in the mind of influential British fantasist M.P. Shiel, and its crown passed (not without controversy) from writer to writer, eventually landing on the noggin of an acclaimed Spanish author, one often touted (including by me) as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The collective whim of its existence has served as secret entertainment for the cognoscenti, but has also had measurable impact on the real world. All this is chronicled in Try Not To Be Strange by Michael Hingston, and it’s oddly fitting that the cerebral but playful Spanish author in question, Javier Marías, took his leave from us the very week this history was fully told.

Marías savored his royal role, handing out honorary aristocratic titles to friends and acquaintances (such as Pedro Almodóvar, Francis Ford Coppola, A.S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Umberto Eco, George Steiner, Ray Bradbury, Frank Gehry, J.M. Coetzee, Éric Rohmer, and Philip Pullman), and I’m eager to learn who will next take the imaginary throne, but I don’t want to focus too closely on Redonda. It was never more than an amusing footnote to Marías’s more important literary accomplishments. 

I became aware of these when I read Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, first published in the US in 2001. It’s a cool, elliptical novel about a one-night stand gone wrong: when the married woman who has invited the narrator into her bedroom suddenly dies of natural causes, he must extricate himself from the situation without compromising himself or her memory. But what about the incriminating message on her answering machine? And worse, what about her young, now unattended, sleeping child? Unable to break his unspeakable connection to a woman he barely new, he becomes a shadowy presence on the periphery of the life she’s left behind.

Entranced by the book’s sinuous sentences, which hesitate, qualify, and doubt even as they assert, à la Henry James, I started working my way backwards and forwards through Marías’s oeuvre. I discovered that his career began precociously, with Conradian novels of seafaring adventure published in his early 20s. He was a lifelong student of world literature, particularly writing in English, and translated works by William Faulkner, Thomas Browne, Vladimir Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. He spent considerable time in the US and at Oxford in England, recording his experiences in the latter (with appropriate artistic license) in All Souls and Dark Back of Time. His slimmest book is Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico, about an interpreter and a rock star on an Acapulco film set; his most expansive is his magnum opus, Your Face Tomorrow, a three-volume novel with epic scale. There’s an enormous amount that goes on between its covers, but imagining James Bond if Proust had created him will give you the idea. The narrator is recruited into a hyper-secret intelligence organization, falls for a colleague, and eventually finds himself in over his head, but that hardly does the book justice. Threads stretch back to British military snafus in World War II and betrayals during the Spanish Civil War; the meanings of words shift as they’re translated from language to language; the psychology of marriage and estrangement is examined; and the philosophy of violence is investigated from all angles. It’s an exploded diagram of a spy novel where every action is labeled with a thought.

Marías was very much a current writer—his final novel, Tomás Nevinson, came out last year and is set for publication in English in 2023—but his work, and indeed his life, seemed in closest conversation with the past. He never used computers, composing on an electric typewriter and correcting with pen on paper, and fussed in his regular newspaper column about various 21st-century indignities, but the affinity ran deeper. Something about him resisted comparison with his contemporaries; his books seemed finer and more lasting, already part of the pantheon. That should make it harder to feel truly sad about his death, but I do, much more than I’d have expected.

—James

[maddie-grove]

Bi-Monthly Reading Round-Up: July/August

Playlist

“Mama Tried” by Merle Haggard (The Mars Room)

“Summer of Sam” by Lana del Rey (Sharp Objects)

“Keep Searchin’” by Del Shannon (Those Girls)

“No One Knows” by Dion and the Belmonts (Fortune’s Lady)

“Unpretty” by TLC (90s Bitch)

“Everybody’s Got the Right to Love” by the Supremes (Fool Me Twice)

“Loving Arms” by the Dixie Chicks (East)

“Spare Parts” by Bruce Springsteen (Joe College)

“You Said You Loved Me” from Bloody Blackbeard (Tomorrow and Forever)

“Hot in Herre” by Nelly (Miss Wonderful)

“Growin’ Up” by David Bowie (The Charm School)

“Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye (The Beggar Maid)

“Henry Lee” by Georgia Fireflies (Fairest)

Best of the Bi-Month

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (2006): Troubled journalist Camille Preaker returns to her claustrophobic Missouri hometown to report on the brutal murders of two teenage girls. The gruesome nature of her assignment is only matched by the cruelty and senselessness that fills her childhood home. Flynn marries a beautifully constructed plot with a wealth of distressingly vivid details, and the result is unforgettable. It’s like if V.C. Andrews had cared about being a more conventionally “good” writer. (No disrespect meant to V.C. Andrews, who didn’t really need to be any better, but she very much did her own thing re: plot and style.) Also, I love Camille a lot.

Worst of the Bi-Month

Fairest by Marissa Meyer (2015): In this prequel to The Lunar Chronicles, Princess Levana leads a luxurious existence on the moon colony ruled by her family, but lives in fear of her sadistic sister and believes she can never be loved because of the terrible scars hidden beneath her glamor. Her desperation for affection and validation eventually turns her into the Evil Moon Queen of the series proper, or something like that. Levana is probably meant to be a lonely, misguided girl who slowly descends into evil due to a barrage of disappointments, or else a conscienceless rapist (yes, rapist) whose suffering renders her somewhat pitiable. I honestly can’t tell, but the result is incoherent, to say the least. 

Rest of the Bi-Month

The Charm School by Susan Wiggs (1999): In 1850s Boston, painfully awkward spinster Isadora Peabody decides to leave her stifling, shallow family and work as a navigator/translator on a clipper ship, much to the frustration (at first!) of its raucous captain. This is a rollicking  romance with a nice Old Hollywood feel, partly because it owes a lot to Now, Voyager. Isadora’s character development is engaging, and there’s some interesting social commentary about the damaging effects of being forced to perform femininity.

The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro (1977): In this collection of short stories, Rose grows up poor and unshielded from the sordid realities of her mid-century Canadian town. Education and marriage change her life almost beyond recognition, and then she changes it again of her own volition. Munro’s descriptions are so perfect that I barely ever had to make an effort to imagine what anything looked like, and her observations about people are uncomfortably accurate. The stories become a little too sedate in the last quarter of the collection, though.

Joe College by Tom Perrotta (2000): Working-class Yale student Danny, equally at sea with his carelessly rich classmates and hostile townie coworkers, runs into even more trouble during a spring break spent driving his father’s lunch truck. Although the story takes a while to get started, it features several terrific setpieces (notably a dinner hosted by a classmate’s personally charming, politically heartless father) and has a thought-provoking ending.

Fortune’s Lady by Patricia Gaffney (1989): In 1790s England, Cass Merlin’s father is hanged as a Jacobin traitor, leaving her disgraced and practically alone in the world. Recruited/blackmailed into acting as a honeypot for a suspected Jacobin ringleader, she doesn’t expect to fall for Philip Riordan, her fellow spy, but you know how these things go. This is probably my favorite of all the Old School romances I’ve read. It has a fun if overly lurid plot inspired by Notorious, a compelling if occasionally idiot-ball-carrying heroine, and a hero who is only occasionally terrible. On the other hand, the villain is a bisexual who hates Edmund Burke, which (a) is kind of offensive and (b) makes it really hard for me, a bisexual who hates Edmund Burke, to hate him.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (2018): Romy, a single mother and stripper from San Francisco, ends up serving two consecutive life sentences in maximum security prison after killing her stalker. This novel pissed me the fuck off, not because it’s bad, but because it showcases the blatant unfairness of the justice system for indigent defendants and the proudly heartless attitude that many people have towards prisoners. Kushner has a terrific style and makes lots of references to 1960s country music, which I appreciate, but she loses steam about two-thirds into the book.

90s Bitch by Allison Yarrow (2018): Pushing back against the wave of nineties nostalgia, Yarrow details the sexism rampant in the decade’s politics and media, covering topics like the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment controversy, the downfall of Tonya Harding, Dan Quayle’s war on Murphy Brown, and the watered-down feminism of the Spice Girls. Yarrow’s account is entertaining as the subject matter is infuriating, but I wish she’d spent more time establishing how the eighties were any less sexist, because that doesn’t sound quite right.

East by Edith Pattou (2003): Ebba-Rose grows up happy with her large family on their early modern Norwegian farm, until poverty, illness, and the exposure of a big lie threaten to end it all. Then a polar bear shows up at the door and offers to fix everything in return for Rose coming to live with him--an offer that Rose feels compelled to take not just out of desperation, but out of wanderlust. I’m not that familiar with “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” but this seems to be a fairly straightforward retelling. It’s charming, though, and it really picks up after the candle incident.

Miss Wonderful by Loretta Chase (2004): Threatened with financial consequences if he doesn’t marry an heiress within a year, Napoleonic war veteran Alistair Carsington says “fuck that” and goes into the canal-building business with a friend in order to come up with the necessary cash. However, going into the canal business brings him into contact with the bewitching Mirabel Oldridge, who fucking hates the idea of a canal running through her village. This Regency romance turned out to be a lot sadder than I thought it would be--the hero and heroine spend just as much time dealing with PTSD and grief for a parent, respectively, as they do bantering--and it was a richer story for all of that. The start was pretty slow, though, and I could’ve done without the disdain for the lower class.

Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran (2014): Desperate for safety, Olivia Holladay cons her way into a housekeeping position at the Duke of Marwick’s house, hoping to find letters that will keep her murderous stalker off her back forever. Then she becomes way too invested in the welfare of the duke, who has become agoraphobic and borderline feral after his wife’s sudden death. This Victorian romance had an even slower start than Miss Wonderful, and I never got a coherent sense of the heroine’s personality; she’s a combination of prim goody-goody and wily con artist, and those two sides never really gel. I did like the conclusion, and Duran’s style is excellent as ever.

Tomorrow and Forever by Maud B. Johnson (1980): Tricked into boarding a bride ship and brutalized by Blackbeard’s pirates, New England girl Marley Lancaster finally finds love with Captain Bates Hagen after they’re set adrift in a dinghy together. They start a new life in Bath, North Carolina, but can it survive the fact that Bates is kind of a dirtbag? I rather enjoyed this Old School romance, partly because of the unusual setting and partly because I just liked the heroine. She’s kind of weak-willed and not very good at solving problems, but she struggles through life anyway and I really rooted for her. Bates, for his part, is...not a rapist. He’s actually the least rapey man in the story, which is how it should be, right? Still, he’s a dirtbag who ditches his common-law wife in a hostile colonial town and seems affronted when she doesn’t stay put. Plus I feel like only half the rapes in the story were narratively necessary.

Those Girls by Chevy Stevens (2015): Three sisters flee their rural Canadian home after the youngest kills their abusive father, only to face more horrible violence from men. Years later, after they’ve started a new life in Vancouver, the past reemerges and, you guessed it, there is more horrible violence. I finished this book and asked myself, “Is a woman made to suffer?” Like, I obviously read a lot about women suffering (see: most of this list), but this whole story is just women suffering, briefly trying to get revenge, and suffering more because of the revenge. 

[dykevillanelle]

angel’s 2017 book list

[books read in 2017: 88] [pages read in 2017: 24,515]

(the photo shows so few because i was traveling for six months and almost exclusively read on my kindle or borrowed books from folks overseas, which of course i had to return to their rightful owners.)

top 5: 

I Await the Devil’s Coming (Mary MacLane)

The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)

Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit (Jay Robin Brown)

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Eli Clare)

The Fire This Time (Jesmyn Ward)

bottom 5: 

Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Inga Muscio)

Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn) 

The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick)

Man Eater (Harold Schecter) 

Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) 

next year’s resolution: 120 books. none written by white men. 

complete list of books under the cut. recommended books are **starry**! 

angel’s book list 2015 / angel’s book list 2016

Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Carroll Smith-Rosenberg) My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (Allan Bérubé) Taking Flight (Siera Maley) *Boy Meets Boy (David Levithan)* *I’ll Tell You In Person (Chloe Caldwell)* Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Inga Muscio) Miracle at Coney Island (Claire Prentice) Just Juliet (Charlotte Reagan) Good Omens (Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett) Coming Clean (Kimberly Rae Miller) The Gravity Between Us (Kristen Zimmer) What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe) Sisters One, Two, Three (Nancy Star) Milk and Honey (Rupi Kaur) Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë) The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick) Dating Sarah Cooper (Siera Maley) If It’s a Choice, My Zygote Chose Balls: Making Sense of Senseless Controversy (Jeremy Hooper) Un hombre afortunado (John Berger) Man Eater (Harold Schecter) *In The Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Ilana Feldman, Miriam Ticktin)* *Shockaholic (Carrie Fisher)* *Alan Turing: The Enigma (Andrew Hodges)* Her Name in the Sky (Kelly Quindlen) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Jesse Andrews) 1984 (George Orwell) *How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Walter Rodney)* The Long Gaze Back (Sinéad Gleeson) Borderlands: Toward an Anthology of the Cosmopolitan Condition Paperweight (Meg Haston) Palm Trees in the Snow (Luz Gabás) Sugar (Deirdre Riordan Hall) Almost Straight (Justice Serai) Think Like A Freak (Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner) *The New Jim Crow (Michelle Alexander)* Cut Both Ways (Carrie Mesrobian) *Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit (Jay Robin Brown)* *Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Eli Clare)* *Adaptation (Malinda Lo)* A Small Revolution (Jimin Han) (207) *An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz)* Solitaire (Alice Oseman) Pearl (Deirdre Riordan Hall) Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (Rachel Cohn & David Levithan) The Teahouse Fire (Ellis Avery) The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (Anne Trubeck) Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) *Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Amy Sonnie, James Tracy)* *Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine)* The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture (Glen Weldon) Knives and Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (Isaac Fitzgerald) Ash (Malinda Lo) Natural Selection (Malinda Lo) 25 Years in the Garden (Jeanette Stokes) 35 Years on the Path (Jeanette Stokes) Tr***y: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (Laura Jane Grace) Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (Fannie Flagg) Trunky (Transgender Junky): A Memoir of Institutionalism and Southern Hospitality (Samuel Peterson) *Audacity (Melanie Crowder)* Hillbilly Elegy (J.D. Vance) Let’s Pretend We Never Met (Melissa Walker) Wild Mountain (Nancy Hayes Kilgore) Animal Farm (George Orwell) The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days (Mark Edmundson) Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt) *Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Sara Marcus)* *I Await the Devil’s Coming (Mary MacLane)* The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot) Shockproof Sydney Skate (Marianne Meaker) The History of White People (Nell Irvin Painter) *The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Jean-Dominique Bauby)* Surpassing Uncertainty (Janet Mock) *The Fire This Time (Jesmyn Ward)* Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut) The Raven Boys (Maggie Stiefvater) Sisters One, Two, Three (Nancy Star) The Dream Thieves (Maggie Stiefvater) North Haven (Sarah Moriarty) Colorblind (Siera Maley) Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk) Blue Lily, Lily Blue (Maggie Stiefvater) The Raven King (Maggie Steifvater) Monkeys (Susan Minot) *Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical RENT (Anthony Rapp)* Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer) *Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)*

[tiffanie-nicole2011-blog]

Farrah Fawcett sweet smile Barbie Doll.

The most beautiful women in TV and Movie History now become Barbie Collector Dolls created by acclaimed re-paint Artist Donna Brinkley.

Farrah Leni Fawcett is known as the world’s Sexiest Star of all time… she will forever be one of Hollywood’s greatest Icons. She was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the younger of two daughters.[3] Her mother, Pauline Alice January 30, 1914 – March 4, 2005), was a homemaker, and her father, James William Fawcett (October 14, 1917 – August 23, 2010), was an oil field contractor. Her sister was Diane Fawcett Walls (October 27, 1938 – October 16, 2001), a graphic artist. She was of Irish, French, English, and Choctaw Native American ancestry. Fawcett once said the name Ferrah was made up by her mother because it went well with their last name.

A Roman Catholic, Fawcett’s early education was at the parish school of the church her family attended, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi. She graduated from W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, where she was voted Most Beautiful by her classmates her Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior years of High School. For three years, 1965–68, Fawcett attended the University of Texas at Austin, living one semester in Jester Center, and she became a sister of Delta Delta Delta Sorority. During her Freshman year, she was named one of the Ten Most Beautiful Coeds on Campus, the first time a Freshman had been chosen. Their photos were sent to various agencies in Hollywood. David Mirsch, a Hollywood agent called her and urged her to come to Los Angeles. She turned him down but he called her for the next two years. Finally, in 1968, the summer following her junior year, with her parents’ permission to try her luck in Hollywood, Farrah moved to Hollywood. She did not return.

Upon arriving in Hollywood in 1968 she was signed to a $350 a week contract with Screen Gems. She began to appear in commercials for UltraBrite toothpaste, Noxema, Max Factor, Wella Balsam shampoo and conditioner, Mercury Cougar automobiles and Beauty Rest matresses. Fawcett’s earliest acting appearances were guest spots on The Flying Nun and I Dream of Jeannie. She made numerous other TV appearances including Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, [Mayberry RFD]] and The Partridge Family. She appeared in four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man with husband Lee Majors, The Dating Game, S.W.A.T and a recurring role on Harry O alongside David Janssen. She also appeared in the Made for TV movies, The Feminist and the Fuzz, The Great American Beauty Contest, The Girl Who Came Giftwrapped, and Murder of Flight 502.

She had a sizable part in the 1969 French romantic-drama, Love Is a Funny Thing. She played opposite Raquel Welch and Mae West in the film version of, Myra Breckinridge (1970). The film earned negative reviews and was a box office flop. However, much has been written and said about the scene where Farrah and Raquel share a bed, and a near sexual experience. Fawcett co-starred with Michael York and Richard Jordan in the well-received science-fiction film, Logan’s Run in 1976.

In 1976, Pro Arts Inc., pitched the idea of a poster of Fawcett to her agent, and a photo shoot was arranged with photographer Bruce McBroom, who was hired by the poster company. According to friend Nels Van Patten, Fawcett styled her own hair and did her make-up without the aid of a mirror. Her blonde highlights were further heightened by a squeeze of lemon juice. From 40 rolls of film, Fawcett herself selected her six favorite pictures, eventually narrowing her choice to the one that made her famous. The resulting poster, of Fawcett in a one-piece red bathing suit, was a best-seller; sales estimates ranged from over 5 million[12] to 8 million to as high as 12 million copies.

On March 21, 1976, the first appearance of Fawcett playing the character Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels was aired as a movie of the week. Fawcett and her husband were frequent tennis partners of producer Aaron Spelling, and he and his producing partner thought of casting Fawcett as the golden girl Jill because of his friendship with the couple. The movie starred Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Fawcett (then billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors) as private investigators for Townsend Associates, a detective agency run by a reclusive multi-millionaire 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. They were aided in the office and occasionally in the field by two male associates, played by character actors David Doyle and David Ogden Stiers. 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 except David Ogden Stiers. Fawcett’s record-breaking poster that sold 12 million copies.

The Charlie’s Angels series formally debuted on September 22, 1976. Fawcett emerged as a fan favorite in the show, and the actress won a People’s Choice Award for Favorite Performer in a New TV Program. In a 1977 interview with TV Guide, Fawcett said: When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.

Fawcett’s appearance in the television show boosted sales of her poster, and she earned far more in royalties from poster sales than from her salary for appearing in Charlie’s Angels. Her hairstyle went on to become an international trend, with women sporting a Farrah-do a Farrah-flip, or simply Farrah hair Iterations of her hair style predominated American women’s hair styles well into the 1980s.

Fawcett left Charlie’s Angels after only one season and Cheryl Ladd replaced her on the show, portraying Jill Munroe’s younger sister Kris Munroe. Numerous explanations for Fawcett’s precipitous withdrawal from the show were offered over the years. The strain on her marriage due to her long absences most days due to filming, as her then-husband Lee Majors was star of an established television show himself, was frequently cited, but Fawcett’s ambitions to broaden her acting abilities with opportunities in films have also been given. Fawcett never officially signed her series contract with Spelling due to protracted negotiations over royalties from her image’s use in peripheral products, which led to an even more protracted lawsuit filed by Spelling and his company when she quit the show.

The show was a major success throughout the world, maintaining its appeal in syndication, spawning a cottage industry of peripheral products, particularly in the show’s first three seasons, 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. The Angels also appeared on the covers of magazines around the world, from countless fan magazines to TV Guide (four times) to Time Magazine.

The series ultimately ran for five seasons. As part of a settlement to a lawsuit over her early departure, Fawcett returned for six guest appearances over seasons three and four of the series.

In 2004, the television movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie’s Angels dramatized the events from the show with supermodel and actress Tricia Helfer portraying Fawcett and Ben Browder portraying Lee Majors, Fawcett’s then-husband.

In 1983, Fawcett won critical acclaim for her role in the Off-Broadway stage production of the controversial play Extremities, written by William Mastrosimone. Replacing Susan Sarandon, she was a would-be rape victim who turns the tables on her attacker. She described the role as the most grueling, the most intense, the most physically demanding and emotionally exhausting of her career. During one performance, a stalker in the audience disrupted the show by asking Fawcett if she had received the photos and letters he had mailed her. Police removed the man and were able only to issue a summons for disorderly conduct.

The following year, her role as a battered wife in the fact-based television movie The Burning Bed (1984) earned her the first of her four Emmy Award nominations. The project is noted as being the first television movie to provide a nationwide 800 number that offered help for others in the situation, in this case victims of domestic abuse. It was the highest-rated television movie of the season.

In 1986, Fawcett appeared in the movie version of Extremities, which was also well received by critics, and for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

She appeared in Jon Avnet’s Between Two Women with Colleen Dewhurst, and took several more dramatic roles as infamous or renowned women. She was nominated for Golden Globe awards for roles as Beate Klarsfeld in Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story and troubled Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story, and won a CableACE Award for her 1989 portrayal of groundbreaking LIFE magazine photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White in Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White. Her 1989 portrayal of convicted murderer Diane Downs in the miniseries Small Sacrifices earned her a second Emmy nomination[20] and her sixth Golden Globe Award nomination. The miniseries won a Peabody Award for excellence in television, with Fawcett’s performance singled out by the organization, which stated Ms. Fawcett brings a sense of realism rarely seen in television miniseries (to) a drama of unusual power Art meets life.

Fawcett, who had steadfastly resisted appearing nude in magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s (although she appeared topless in the 1980 film Saturn 3), caused a major stir by posing semi-nude in the December 1995 issue of Playboy.[citation needed] At the age of 50, she returned to Playboy with a pictorial for the July 1997 issue, which also became a top seller. The issue and its accompanying video featured Fawcett painting on canvas using her body, which had been an ambition of hers for years.

That same year, Fawcett was chosen by Robert Duvall to play his wife in an independent feature film he was producing, The Apostle. Fawcett received an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Actress for the film, which was highly critically acclaimed.

In 2000, she worked with director Robert Altman and an all-star cast in the feature film Dr. T the Women, playing the wife of Richard Gere (her character has a mental breakdown, leading to her first fully nude appearance). Also that year, Fawcett’s collaboration with sculptor Keith Edmier was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, later traveling to The Andy Warhol Museum. The sculpture was also presented in a series of photographs and a book by Rizzoli.

In November 2003, Fawcett prepared for her return to Broadway in a production of Bobbi Boland, the tragicomic tale of a former Miss Florida. However, the show never officially opened, closing before preview performances. Fawcett was described as vibrating with frustration at the producer’s extraordinary decision to cancel the production. Only days earlier the same producer closed an Off-Broadway show she had been backing.

Fawcett continued to work in television, with well-regarded appearances in made-for-television movies and on popular television series including Ally McBeal and four episodes each of Spin City and The Guardian, her work on the latter show earning her a third Emmy nomination in 2004.

Fawcett was married to Lee Majors, star of television’s The Six Million Dollar Man, from 1973 to 1982, although the couple separated in 1979. During her marriage, she was known and credited in her roles as Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

From 1979 until 1997 Fawcett was involved romantically with actor Ryan O’Neal. The relationship produced a son, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal, born January 30, 1985 in Los Angeles.[26] In April 2009, on probation for driving under the influence, Redmond was arrested for possession of narcotics while Fawcett was in the hospital.[citation needed] On June 22, 2009, The Los Angeles Times and Reuters reported that Ryan O’Neal had said that Fawcett had agreed to marry him as soon as she felt strong enough.

From 1997 to 1998, Fawcett had a relationship with Canadian filmmaker James Orr, writer and producer of the Disney feature film in which she co-starred with Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Man of the House. The relationship ended when Orr was charged with and later convicted of beating Fawcett during a 1998 fight between the two.

On June 5, 1997, Fawcett received negative commentary after giving a rambling interview and appearing distracted on Late Show with David Letterman. Months later, she told the host of The Howard Stern Show her behavior was just her way of joking around with the television host, partly in the guise of promoting her Playboy pictoral and video, explaining what appeared to be random looks across the theater was just her looking and reacting to fans in the audience. Though the Letterman appearance spawned speculation and several jokes at her expense, she returned to the show a week later, with success, and several years later, after Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling act on a February 2009 appearance on The Late Show, Letterman wrapped up the interview by saying, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight and recalled Fawcett’s earlier appearance by noting we owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.

Fawcett’s elder sister, Diane Fawcett Walls, died from lung cancer just before her 63rd birthday, on October 16, 2001.[33] The fifth episode of her 2005 Chasing Farrah series followed the actress home to Texas to visit with her father, James, and mother, Pauline. Pauline Fawcett died soon after, on March 4, 2005, at the age of 91.

Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, and began treatment, including chemotherapy and surgery. Four months later, on her 60th birthday, the Associated Press wire service reported that Fawcett was, at that point, cancer free.

Less than four months later, in May 2007, Fawcett brought a small digital video camera to document a doctor’s office visit. There, she was told a malignant polyp was found where she had been treated for the initial cancer. Doctors contemplated whether to implant a radiation seeder (which differs from conventional radiation and is used to treat other types of cancer). Fawcett’s U.S. doctors told her that she would require a colostomy. Instead, Fawcett traveled to Germany for treatments described variously in the press as holistic aggressive and alternative. There, Dr. Ursula Jacob prescribed a treatment including surgery to remove the anal tumor, and a course of perfusion and embolization for her liver cancer by Doctors Claus Kiehling and Thomas Vogl in Germany, and chemotherapy back in Fawcett’s home town of Los Angeles. Although initially the tumors were regressing, their reappearance a few months later necessitated a new course, this time including laser ablation therapy and chemoembolization. Aided by friend Alana Stewart, Fawcett documented her battle with the disease.

In early April 2009, Fawcett, back in the United States, was hospitalized, with media reports declaring her unconscious and in critical condition, although subsequent reports indicated her condition was not so dire. On April 6, the Associated Press reported that her cancer had metastasized to her liver, a development Fawcett had learned of in May 2007 and which her subsequent treatments in Germany had targeted. The report denied that she was unconscious, and explained that the hospitalization was due not to her cancer but a painful abdominal hematoma that had been the result of a minor procedure. Her spokesperson emphasized she was not at death’s door adding – She remains in good spirits with her usual sense of humor … She’s been in great shape her whole life and has an incredible resolve and an incredible resilience. Fawcett was released from the hospital on April 9, picked up by longtime companion O’Neal, and, according to her doctor, was walking and in great spirits and looking forward to celebrating Easter at home.

A month later, on May 7, Fawcett was reported as critically ill, with Ryan O’Neal quoted as saying she now spends her days at home, on an IV, often asleep. The Los Angeles Times reported Fawcett was in the last stages of her cancer and had the chance to see her son Redmond in April 2009, although shackled and under supervision, as he was then incarcerated. Her 91-year-old father, James Fawcett, flew out to Los Angeles to visit.

The cancer specialist that was treating Fawcett in L.A., Dr. Lawrence Piro, and Fawcett’s friend and Angels co-star Kate Jackson – a breast cancer survivor – appeared together on The Today Show dispelling tabloid-fueled rumors, including suggestions Fawcett had ever been in a coma, had ever reached 86 pounds, and had ever given up her fight against the disease or lost the will to live. Jackson decried such fabrications, saying they really do hurt a human being and a person like Farrah. Piro recalled when it became necessary for Fawcett to undergo treatments that would cause her to lose her hair, acknowledging Farrah probably has the most famous hair in the world but also that it is not a trivial matter for any cancer patient, whose hair affects [one’s] whole sense of who [they] are. Of the documentary, Jackson averred Fawcett didn’t do this to show that ‘she’ is unique, she did it to show that we are all unique … This was … meant to be a gift to others to help and inspire them.

The two-hour documentary Farrah’s Story, which was filmed by Fawcett and friend Alana Stewart, aired on NBC on May 15, 2009.[47] The documentary was watched by nearly nine million people at its premiere airing, and it was re-aired on the broadcast network’s cable stations MSNBC, Bravo and Oxygen. Fawcett earned her fourth Emmy nomination posthumously on July 16, 2009, as producer of Farrah’s Story.

Controversy surrounded the aired version of the documentary, with her initial producing partner, who had worked with her four years earlier on her reality series Chasing Farrah, alleging O’Neal’s and Stewart’s editing of the program was not in keeping with Fawcett’s wishes to more thoroughly explore rare types of cancers such as her own and alternative methods of treatment. He was especially critical of scenes showing Fawcett’s son visiting her for the last time, in shackles, while she was nearly unconscious in bed. Fawcett had generally kept her son out of the media, and his appearances were minimal in Chasing Farrah.

Fawcett died at approximately 9:28 am, PDT on June 25, 2009, in the intensive care unit of Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, with O’Neal and Stewart by her side. A private funeral was held in Los Angeles on June 30. Fawcett’s son Redmond was permitted to leave his California detention center to attend his mother’s funeral, where he gave the first reading.

The night of her death, ABC aired an hour-long special episode of 20/20 featuring clips from several of Barbara Walters’ past interviews with Fawcett as well as new interviews with Ryan O’Neal, Jaclyn Smith, Alana Stewart, and Dr. Lawrence Piro. Walters followed up on the story on Friday’s episode of 20/20. CNN’s Larry King Live planned a show exclusively about Fawcett that evening until the death of Michael Jackson several hours later caused the program to shift to cover both stories. Cher, a longtime friend of Fawcett, and Suzanne de Passe, executive producer of Fawcett’s Small Sacrifices mini-series, both paid tribute to Fawcett on the program. NBC aired a Dateline NBC special Farrah Fawcett: The Life and Death of an Angel; the following evening, June 26, preceded by a rebroadcast of Farrah’s Story in prime time. That weekend and the following week, television tributes continued. MSNBC aired back-to-back episodes of its Headliners and Legends episodes featuring Fawcett and Jackson. TV Land aired a mini-marathon of Charlie’s Angels and Chasing Farrah episodes. E! aired Michael and Farrah: Lost Icons and the The Biography Channel aired Bio Remembers: Farrah Fawcett. The documentary Farrah’s Story re-aired on the Oxygen Network and MSNBC.

Larry King said of the Fawcett phenomenon, TV had much more impact back in the ’70s than it does today. Charlie’s Angels got huge numbers every week – nothing really dominates the television landscape like that today. Maybe American Idol comes close, but now there are so many channels and so many more shows it’s hard for anything to get the audience, or amount of attention, that Charlie’s Angels got. Farrah was a major TV star when the medium was clearly dominant.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said Farrah was one of the iconic beauties of our time. Her girl-next-door charm combined with stunning looks made her a star on film, TV and the printed page.

Kate Jackson said, She was a selfless person who loved her family and friends with all her heart, and what a big heart it was. Farrah showed immense courage and grace throughout her illness and was an inspiration to those around her… I will remember her kindness, her cutting dry wit and, of course, her beautiful smile…when you think of Farrah, remember her smiling because that is exactly how she wanted to be remembered: smiling.

She is buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

The red one-piece bathing suit worn by Farrah in her famous 1976 poster was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) on February 2, 2011.[65] Said to have been purchased at a Saks Fifth Avenue store, the red Lycra suit made by the leading Australian swimsuit company Speedo, was donated to the Smithsonian by her executors and was formally presented to NMAH in Washington D.C. by her longtime companion Ryan O’Neal.[66] The suit and the poster are expected to go on temporary display sometime in 2011–12. They will be made additions to the Smithsonian’s popular culture department.

The famous poster of Farrah in a red swimsuit has been produced as a Barbie doll. The limited edition dolls, complete with a gold chain and the girl-next-door locks, have been snapped up by Barbie fans.

In 2011, Men’s Health named her one of the 100 Hottest Women of All-Time ranking her at No. 31

Posted by CelebToys on 2012-10-04 19:18:07

Tagged:

The post Farrah Fawcett sweet smile Barbie Doll. appeared first on Good Info.

[sameantics]

What Would Sarah Polley Do?

The unorthodox film heroine’s 20-year journey to Alias Grace.

 By Anna Silman

Sarah Polley first picked up Alias Grace — Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel about an Irish servant girl accused of double-homicide in 19th-century Canada — when she was 17 years old. She remembers lying on her couch, drinking endless cups of milky, sugary tea, reading in a brightly lit room through the Toronto winter. “I don’t think I moved from that couch for days and days and days,” the filmmaker and actress recalls. “And then I read it again.”

Today, Polley is an auteur whose movies — Away From Her, Take This Waltz, and the autobiographical Stories We Tell — form a sort of three-part meditation on female restlessness, the complexity of long-term relationships, and the slipperiness of memory and truth. But back when she first tried to option the rights to Alias Grace at age 18 — as a well-regarded young actress with no filmmaking experience — Atwood turned her down. “I started thinking about making it into a film when I was close to Grace’s age at the time of the murders, and now I’m almost the age Grace is at the end of the novel,” says Polley, now 38, whose long-gestating adaptation rolls out as a six-part mini-series on Netflix November 3, hot on the heels of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale adaptation. “My understanding of why I was so drawn to it has changed over 20 years of psychoanalysis, which has involved talking about this book a lot,” she adds with a laugh.

I meet Polley on a sweltering September morning on the edge of Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park. Wearing a long-sleeved salmon-colored dress and gold earrings with her daughters’ initials, she’s petite, unassuming, and immediately solicitous. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “Do you want something healthy or fattening?” We decide the answer is both, so Polley steers us toward the Swan, a favorite local diner, where — ravenous after a day of press — she orders a grapefruit juice, avocado toast, fried chicken, fried Brussels sprouts, and two side salads. By the time our food has come, she’s gently peppered me with questions about myself and is trying to get me to eat more. “You didn’t order very much,” she says, looking at my kale salad in concern. “Ah, sorry, I’m being nosy.” She furrows her brow and slips into a stern, matronly voice: “You’re not eating very much, dear!”

In a previous life, Polley was a reluctant child star, and subsequently a reluctant Hollywood ingenue. Yet over her 20s and 30s, she has established herself as a preeminent voice in Canadian film — a rare position, given that most successful Canadians migrate south of the border as soon as Hollywood starts paying attention to them. Polley has remained in Toronto, where she lives with her second husband (who is pursuing a Ph.D. in law) and two young daughters. “A big part of why she is so well-known and beloved is that she rejected American stardom,” explains Jesse Brown, a prominent Canadian media figure and host of the CanadaLand podcast. “A crucial conceit of the fragile Canadian ego is that we live here by choice. It’s not really true for most Canadians, but it is for Sarah. She’s like an anti-star. She’s famous for not being more famous.”

Polley, the youngest of five siblings, was raised in Toronto by her father Michael, an actor, and her mother Diane, an actress and casting director who died of cancer when Polley was 11. She started acting at 4, and ascended to national celebrity with a lead role in the TV adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Road to Avonlea, which aired on the Disney Channel in the U.S. The show was a Canadian-TV mainstay from 1990 to 1996, and it made Polley “Canada’s Sweetheart” — a title from which she recoiled. At 12, she famously got in trouble with Disney for wearing a peace sign on a red carpet to protest the Gulf War. At 14, already fiercely independent, she moved out of her family house and took a break from acting to focus on left-wing political activism, which included getting some teeth knocked out by riot police during a protest against Ontario’s conservative government. In a 1996 clip from a Canadian teen talk show called Jonovision, 17-year-old Sarah, wearing an oversize sweater emblazoned with the logo for an Ontario trade union, is asked whether people think she’s just being a celebrity do-gooder. “Not so much,” she shoots back. “If it was to promote my career, I’d pick something a little bit more fashionable, like AIDS. I think it’s great celebrities in Hollywood stand up for things like that, but no one really stands up for anything controversial, like really challenging the system that creates this growing disparity between the rich and the poor.” When the host notes her middle-class upbringing, she responds: “Karl Marx was middle class, too.”

In 1999 — the same year she starred in Guinevere, produced by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax (more on that later) — Polley was on the cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue, along with Kate Hudson, Julia Stiles, and Reese Witherspoon. In 2000, she turned down the role of Penny Lane in Almost Famous. Afterward, aside from a few blockbuster outings, Polley mostly took projects within the Canadian indie scene. In 2006, she directed her first feature-length film, Away From Her, and found a freedom that she had never had as an actress. “I had a couple of really shitty experiences and I thought, you know what? I love writing and directing,” she says, alternating between bites of chicken and avocado toast. “It makes me extremely happy. I’ve never been ambitious as an actor — I like it every now and then, but it’s never been my main passion. So, what’s the point of this? I’ll put myself in this position again when I’m 60. Although — ” she adds with a wry laugh. “I’ll have to write a part for myself.”

Luckily, Polley proved to be an even better director than she was an actor. “Sarah plays film the way Mozart played the piano,” says Margaret Atwood.

Or, in the words of Take This Waltz star Michelle Williams: “Sometimes when I’m acting, years ago and now, I will give myself my own, simple, direction. I whisper to myself: ‘What would Sarah Polley do?’”

Although she was well-known in the industry at the time, Polley still recalls facing a ton of resistance when she was trying to make her first film. “I got no, no, no, over again and was flatly discouraged from even trying,” she recalls. When she tried again with Away From Her, which was based on an Alice Munro short story, “I was told people were going around parties saying ‘now she’s trying with an Alice Munro film, boooring,’” she says, shaking her head with a bemused smile.

In Away From Her, which garnered Oscar nominations for best actress and best adapted screenplay, an elderly woman suffering from Alzheimer’s (played by Julie Christie) moves into a nursing home, where she loses almost all memory of her husband (Gordon Pinsent) and develops a close relationship with another man. In Take This Waltz, Margot (Michelle Williams) explodes her happy marriage to Lou (Seth Rogen) when she develops an infatuation with the handsome stranger who lives across the road from her house in downtown Toronto. In each story, Polley regards the female protagonist’s yearning as well as her long-term relationship with empathy and respect. When Margot leaves the husband that she loves for the new man that she also loves, we don’t know whether she’s making the right choice — neither does Margot — and Polley isn’t there to tell us (she divorced her first husband, a film editor, in 2008).

What Rogen, one of the many Canadians who grew up with Polley as a constant screen presence, remembers most is how personal and intimate the filmmaking experience was. “I remember how quiet the set was compared to our normal movie sets, which I liked,” he tells me. “She’s so present and connected and empathetic in a way that especially in movies very few people are. There are a lot of people who are just waiting for their turn to talk, and I find myself guilty of that as well. But she is not like that. She was looking for all these little emotional things that were not conversations I’d ever had on a movie set before. We were having deeper and more nuanced conversations than I had ever had.”

A longtime fan of Polley’s work, Michelle Williams said she’d expected to appreciate her intellectual and emotional depth when she met her as the director of Take This Waltz. But she was caught off-guard by her humor. “She is, in any situation, the funniest person in the room,” Williams says. “I laugh spasmodically at her jokes and still retell them years later because they combine humor with truth, and as far as I can tell, that is what makes life bearable.” Julie Christie, who first met Sarah when they costarred in Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing, remembers being struck that a woman in her 20s would choose to make her first film about Alzheimer’s: “Serious stuff. But Sarah has a mad sense of humor which creates a very happy and loyal atmosphere amongst her cast and crew.” When Polley shows up on set, “everyone would light up and get excited,” says Sarah Gadon, who stars in Alias Grace.

Her third feature, Stories We Tell — a film all about the power and incompleteness of narrative, and the unfathomable depths that exist in any single life — might be the closest thing to an artistic statement of intent, the ur-text if we’re to understand who Sarah Polley is and why Alias Grace struck such a chord with her. The autobiographical documentary even begins with a quote from Atwood’s novel: “When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood,” Polley’s father Michael narrates in voice-over. “It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you’re telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

Turning the lens on her own family, Polley sets out to explore one of the foundational myths of her own life. Ever since she was a child, Polley’s siblings joked about how little she resembled her father, and in Stories We Tell Polley finds the truth: Her mother had an affair while she was doing a play in Montreal, and Polley’s biological father is actually a Montreal film producer named Harry Gulkin. To make the film, Polley interviews her siblings, her dad, her biological father, her mom’s friends, and more, giving each the chance to tell their own version of the story — which diverge and overlap in small but meaningful ways. The finished product is less a film about Sarah’s own story than a way to analyze the way we make sense of our own lives through narrative, and the necessary incompleteness of any act of storytelling.

“I think people try to pin down and categorize women more than they do men,” says Polley. “Obviously my mom was a restless woman, and I think a lot of women are, and I think it’s something that we can’t quite handle. Reading Alias Grace gave me a frame through which to look at a lot of other stories, including those in my own life, in terms of there being many different versions of the same story and not one of them being the truth, but all of them existing together in chorus.”

In 2012, now an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Polley again approached Atwood about the rights to Alias Grace, and this time Atwood agreed to hold the project for her until she was ready. But then she got pregnant twice in quick succession, and opted to focus on raising her two daughters. She wrote much of the script in stolen minutes during nap-time — which she sees as another big problem facing women in the industry. “The next step, once we actually get people to trust that women can make films, is to create an environment that women with children also want to make films,” she said. “A lot of us are self-selecting out of it just because we have children.”

Over the years, what Polley had originally envisioned as a feature film expanded into a mini-series – with all six episodes penned by Polley – and found a home on CBC and Netflix. While she originally planned to direct, she decided ultimately to pass the mantle to American Psycho’s Mary Harron (a fellow Canadian). Through all this, Polley said Atwood’s faith in the project never wavered, despite the many opportunities for frustration. “Instead she mostly was concerned about how my pregnancies were going and how my kids were and offering advice about being a mom,” she says. “She’s got this side to her that I felt like I don’t see reflected a lot in media, which is she’s incredibly nurturing and maternal, especially with young women.”

When Polley first began writing, Atwood spent six hours answering every question she’d ever had about the book. Whenever they sat down together, Atwood would grab her notepad and jot down dozens of books and movies Polley had to see. “You feel like you’re in a full course lecture with her,” says Polley. “She wants to see everything, she wants to do everything, and I think that that’s why she’s so incredible with character and why she sees so deeply into the underbelly of human nature — she’s just never stopped being hungry.”

Alias Grace tells the true story of Grace Marks (played by Sarah Gadon), an poor 16–year-old Irish-Canadian immigrant accused of murdering her employer Thomas Kinnear (Paul Gross) and his mistress Nancy Montgomery (Anna Paquin) in Toronto in the mid-1800s, in collusion with Kinnear’s stablehand James McDermott (Kerr Logan). (The production feels a bit like a who’s who of Canadian cinema; even David Cronenberg has a bit part.) Her case became an object of public fascination, with Grace as a cipher onto which contemporary onlookers could project their opinions — was she crazy or coerced, wicked or possessed? When we meet Grace, she has been in prison for 15 years, and an early practitioner of the nascent field of psychiatry, Dr. Simon Jordan (Edward Holcroft), has come to interview her. Yet the more he gets to know her, the less he is able to put her in a box. For Polley, the crucial challenge was retaining the book’s ambiguity, which the show does by filtering the story through a number of narrative layers — we see Grace telling her story to Doctor Jordan, and we also see Grace reflecting on what she decides to tell him, while a series of flashbacks both reinforce and complicate the story she shares.

While Alias Grace is bound to garner comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale — and will certainly attract viewers caught up in the current Atwood-mania — the two shows couldn’t feel less alike. “They have nothing to do with each other tonally, aesthetically, thematically, visually,” says Polley, who confesses she has seen not all, but “a lot,” of The Handmaid’s Tale. Where The Handmaid’s Tale has the slickness of prestige TV (think rock songs playing over hyper-stylized tableaux of red-robed Handmaids), Alias Grace, at least visually, is a much more austere, traditional period drama. At times, it calls to mind the “Canadian Heritage moments” that used to air on Canadian TV to teach people about key milestones in the country’s history.

Yet despite that familiarity, it avoids any romanticized nostalgia. “We always see it in this Merchant Ivory context that’s kind of glossy. From a female perspective and from the perspective of an immigrant and somebody who was in the servant class, I think suddenly the Victorian era doesn’t look so pretty anymore,” says Polley. She sees Alias Grace and Handmaid’s Tale as perfect companion pieces for our present moment: one a vision of the horrific possible future, the other a vision of the horrific real past. For all its postmodern storytelling conceits, Grace’s story is an unflinching portrait of the violent patriarchal society that spawned her. The show is an unending cavalcade of abuses, from the brutal sea passage over from Ireland to Grace’s subjugation at the hands of a series of male tormentors, and shot through with horrifying moments of violence and bloodshed, including a botched back-alley abortion.

“I think women at that time were prey and continue to be in many places and indeed in North America, too,” says Polley. “Grace was harassed, abused constantly. So where does that go? What do you do with that? Who do you become? I think it’s so interesting when you look at Grace and ask: What got repressed and what happened to it? Because those things don’t go away — that anger, and that fear, and that sadness — it doesn’t disappear. What does it get turned into if you can’t express it?” she says. “I’m so fascinated by what the repercussions of that were in a woman’s psyche.”

Suddenly, in the midst of this very serious conversation, Polley leans forward to take a sip of her grapefruit juice and overshoots, so the straw goes up her nose, spraying grapefruit juice onto the leather banquette. “Oh my god! That was amazing.” She starts giggling. “I’ve done that my whole life, where I don’t hold the straw and I just go for it, and I’ve been made fun of for it my whole life, and that has never happened. I’ve finally physically learned my lesson, which, gold fucking star.”

She wipes her nose and grins. “That was great.”

There seems to be a disparity between the kind of work Polley makes and her sunny energy in person, which she freely acknowledges. “I do think there’s something weird about that,” she says. “I really like people, I’m really social, I’m not sort of brooding.” Yet as easy as she is to be around, and as willing as she is to volunteer intimate psychoanalytic insights, I never quite get the feeling that she’s putting all her cards on the table. While she’s happy to discourse about the big ideas and feelings that animate her work, she resists discussing her personal life beyond what we’ve seen onscreen (for instance, she won’t tell me where in Toronto she lives, and as much as I scour Google, I can’t seem to find a single mention of her youngest daughter’s name). No matter how forthcoming she is, something about her always feels a little out of reach.

“When you are written about since you were little, you sort of feel like — when someone pins down an identity for you then it’s almost like you have to make some kind of a statement to just be who you are, which is complex and not only that one thing …” she says, before trailing off. “Then there’s all of a sudden a person out there, that you didn’t create.”

Sarah Polley prefers to tell her own stories. A few weeks after our interview, her byline appears in the New York Times under the ominous title “The Men You Meet Making Movies.” In the piece, Polley describes Harvey Weinstein offering her the opportunity for “a very close relationship” when she was shooting Guinevere for Miramax in the late ’90s, which she says her lack of ambition as an actor gave her the freedom to turn down. And she elaborates on what she has suggested to me — that she went into writing and directing partly because the movie world treated women actors like garbage. “Now there were no assistant directors trying to cajole me into sitting on their laps, no groups of men standing around to assess how I looked in a particular piece of clothing,” she writes. “I could decide what I felt was important to say.”

Over lunch, she shared a story that later made its way into the Times piece, about getting a bunch of actresses together to share their “hilarious” experiences with men in the industry — only to find the stories getting less and less funny as they realized they were all describing abuse and assault. “It was so horrifying realizing as we listened to each other that this had become normalized for us, that this was the culture,” she tells me. “The dynamic between older male filmmakers and young actresses is not one of trust.” (When I message Polley a few weeks later to follow up on the Weinstein piece, she says she doesn’t want to say much beyond what she’d written, but added that “it felt good to finally frame it in [her] own words.”)

Although activism always has always been an essential part of Polley’s identity — “that thing that was supposed to happen at 30 years old, where you become less left wing did not happen to me,” Polley jokes — she, like many others, has found herself newly emboldened in 2017 when it comes to speaking out about feminism, racial inequality, and sexual violence. “I was a big fan of Camille Paglia when I was a teenager,” Polley tells me, with a knowing eye roll. “It was really easy as someone born in ’79 in a white middle-class background to disregard what feminism was, because it felt like it had always been this way. Then you start to get older and you start to think, like, if an alien came down from outer space and you showed them the history of women over thousands and thousands of years, where they had no rights, no agency, nothing, and then this tiny blip of a few decades where actually things were starting to look up, would you think that’s inevitably going to last? Or would you think probably not? And I think what we’re seeing now is the probably not.”

She says her goal now is to keep learning, and to try and help create space in the industry and provide resources for filmmakers of color to tell their own stories, an ongoing education she attributes in large part to watching Black Lives Matter unfold. She’s developing what she describes as a “more collective project,” bringing together women from different backgrounds to give voice to their own stories. She is also working on the script for adaptation of Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People, about a man accused of sexual assault and how his family — who know him as a loving father and husband — grapples with the allegations. Right now, most of her energy still remains focused on raising her two girls, who are 3 and 5. “The truth is that I’m still not really back,” she acknowledges. “I keep thinking that I’m ready to not be there [with her kids] all the time, and I end up being wrong about that.”

Yet while Polley plans to eventually return to directing, she acknowledges that the creative journey she began when she picked up Alias Grace at age 17 — which encompassed tracking down her birth father, devoting three films to the boundless subject of self-searching, and, finally, bringing her favorite book to the screen — may be coming to something of a close. “It’s possible that I’ve got this particular neurosis out of my system,” she says. Still, “I remember saying to the first psychoanalyst I went to: ‘My worry is, like, if I do this and I understand too much about myself, I won’t have anything to make, because I’ll “get it” too much,’” Polley recalls with a wry laugh. “And she was like, ‘One thing I can assure you of is that there will always be things you won’t get to the bottom of.’ And that remains true, 20 years later. There’s absolutely no danger of me understanding too much about myself.”

[americanmyths-blog]

Bromance on the Frontier

Tina Nguyen

Dr. Christina Rothenbeck

English 2270 – 002

28 April 2017

To survive in a cold and dark world, like America, there must be bonds. Bonds vary according to time, circumstances, and experienced connections. During the 1800s, there was the Indian Removal Act. Because of this hatred against all Indians, many of the Indians bonded to protect the culture. During the 1900s, World War II occurs, which caused many Americans to unite against the true enemy, the Germans. Both these events caused the separation of biological families. To counteract this monstrosity, the men all form bonds to kill for one another and to protect one another.

America fights with other countries to expand West, because going West means gaining more new land; however, the West is also a symbol of America’s wild heritage. Before civilization interfered, the West was a masculine place in which murder and freedom was allowed. No rules or regulations governed the West. The West depicts the freedom and opportunities that America wanted to display after becoming a country. While traveling on the frontier land, male characters from Last of the Mohicans and On the Road find themselves reflecting homosocial relationships to form close, masculine family units, only breaking at the last moments of life due to the controversy of the real definition of a family.

In Last of the Mohicans, the frontier is a symbol of the free, masculine lands that have not been changed by civilization yet. In the frontier, people are unrestrained and strong, because the frontier is also a symbol of wild and savage. The frontier is a vast sea of land that has yet to be discovered or tamed. Because of this masculine liberation, many men fight on the frontier to protect what they value the most – the love and honor of their men.

The men, in Last of the Mohicans, sacrifice their life and humanity to protect their own brotherly bonds. The biological bond, of blood, does not necessarily entail a close familial relationship. In Last of the Mohicans, Colonel Munro easily leaves Cora and Alice on the battlefield because of his duty to his troops. “‘To-day I am only a soldier. All that you see here, claim alike to be my children’” (Cooper 171). “Munro ignores Alice's call in order to play the part of colonel to his larger family, the inhabitants of the fort” (Chapman 4). Colonel Munro took his relationship with “his men” as more important than his relationships with his daughters, two women. They could have died in this bloodbath; however, this domestic link was nothing compared to the honorable bond with his troops. In conclusion, Colonel Munro took this masculine tie and honored it, even upon his and his family’s dying breath.

Blood and murder are often depicted as too “manly” for a frail, young lady; thus, they are signs of masculine bonds. The Huron warriors, who hunt the Munro sisters, are all men. Even though these men do not know these women, they risk their lives to capture them, because of their bond with Magua. “The Hurons stood aghast at this sudden visitation of death on one of their band’” (Cooper 111). Eventually, some of them die, but they do not regret it, because they honored their “brotherhood” with Magua and the other deceased Hurons.

Chingachook and Hawkeye have a bond that supersedes their differences of cultures – Uncas is the result of this bond. They both teach their “son” the art of weapons and hiding. These arts can only work to protect Uncas from death. Even though both men from different cultures, they both reflect parental features, and that bonds them as great brothers. Chingachook asks Hawkeye, “Is there no difference between the stone-headed arrow of the warrior and the leaden bullet with which you kill’” (Cooper 30)? Chingachook wants to show Hawkeye that the “white man” fought with the “red man,” like brethren in arms. The “white man” and the “Red man” fighting together is the general description of Chingachook and Hawkeye. While hiding to rescue the travelers, Hawkeye, Chingachook, and Uncas hide in the trees: “The Hurons stood aghast at this sudden visitation of death on one of their band” (Cooper 111). Uncas, Hawkeye, and Chingachook know the art of hiding to rescue the travelers and to protect themselves.

In conclusion, the men’s bonds in Last of the Mohicans prove to be strong and fatal. This dangerous love affair is also recognized as part of the wild and unrestrained frontier. These bonds can only occur on the frontier, thus their lack of restraint and care. This causes the irrational love between men. This love is irrational and dangerous because love can only occur between a man and a woman during this time. It is not realistic to sustain the love between two men. “These reunions are temporary because external threats separate or kill family members, but on a symbolic level, these reunions cannot last because the family without a mother has no means of perpetuating itself” (Chapman 6).

In On the Road, the characters go Westward to find the frontier; however, the character list is “dominated by men (Olsson 6)”. The frontier is a symbol of the lost, masculine lands that have not been tainted by civilization yet. The frontier was a depiction of the glorious past of America, in which opportunities and freedom were still to be found. In the frontier, people are free, because the frontier is also a representation of unrestraint. The frontier highlights the culture of: “an urban post-war subculture that consisted of young intellectuals that opposed “square” society and rejected values like the nuclear family and the oppressed sexuality” (Olsson 21). Because of this subculture view, the main characters search the West to find the frontier. Throughout the journey, the men try to defend what they value the most – the love and honor of their companions.

Dean Moriarty is the epitome of men to Sal Paradise. Sal worships him as a brother and a pedestal, both of which deserve the utmost respect. Sal describes Dean when Sal first met him: “My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry – trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent – a side burned hero of the snowy West” (Kerouac 2). The West is a vast, unrestrained, masculine land. Sal compares Dean to the memories of the glorious past of America; thus, Sal displays his awe and love for Dean. Sal explains why he considers keeping Dean as a friend: “Somehow, in spite of our difference in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother; the sight of his suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his straining muscular sweating neck made me remember my boyhood in those dye-dumps and swimholes and riversides of Paterson and the Passaic. And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices of old companions and brothers” (Kerouac 7). Sal believes their friendship as worth keeping because of the feeling of nostalgia. Also, he uses the term “brother” often to refer to Dean. Even though he only just met Dean, he considers Dean as an old time friend, possibly even family member. When Major first meets Dean, Major believes Dean to be “a moron and a fool” (Kerouac 41); however, Sal “[wants] to prove [that] he wasn’t” (Kerouac 41). Even after abandonment of three girls and Sal, Sal still persists on thinking that Dean is a smart and good person. Sal recalls the “pivotal moment” in Dean and his friendship: “Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said – ‘Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.’ I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us” (Kerouac 178). This is the first time Dean actually acknowledges Sal’s feelings for Dean. Friends do not usually spend hours thinking about another friend’s worries; however, Sal does this. This expresses how Sal’s love for Dean surpasses that of a friend. Sal is embarrassed by this confrontation; however, it seems like all he wants is Dean’s response that their friendship means the whole world.

Besides Dean and Sal’s friendship, Dean also finds a great friend in Carlo Marx. Sal describes Dean and Carlo’s first meeting: “A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes - the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn’t keep up with them” (Kerouac 5). Sal calls both characters as “con-man.” A con-man gains trust through lies and tricks; thus, Sal possibly already knew their connection was a lie, yet he refuses to leave Dean or Carlo. Sal also witnesses the pair’s interaction: “Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed crosslegged and looked straight at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events; Dean apologized but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine, bringing up illustrations” (Kerouac 43). Sal comprehends that Carlo and Dean’s relationship is also beyond words – abstract and illustrations. Usually, communication is words and gestures; however, Carlo and Dean’s masculine relationship is closer and deeper than normal relationships, possibly even the relationship of lovers.

In conclusion, On the Road displays the different relationships of characters. Most of the novel consists of the masculine bonds created. These homosocial bonds surpass the relationship between man and woman. These bonds conclude in destruction because of the irregularity of them in this culture and time. At the end of the novel, most of the characters leave their friendships and have a regular, male and female family. “Sal finally realizes that travelling can enrich and enlighten a person’s life, but only for a limited time. With the help of the new experiences and the maturity obtained the urbane man can deal with “normal” life in a more creative way” (Ollson 22).

America and the American Dream are founded through longing for the wildness and freedom of the frontier; however, all life returns to having a family and “settling down.” The male characters, from Last of the Mohicans and On the Road, have bonds that surpass friendship; however, because of the lack of femininity, the relationships usually end in death or abandonment.

Works Cited:

- Chapman, Mary. "Infanticide and Cultural Reproduction in Cooper's the Last.." Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, Winter1991, p. 407. EBSCOhost, libezp.lib.lsu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9702181432&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

- Cooper, James Fenimore., et al. The Last of the Mohicans. Harlow, Essex, Longman, 1981.

- Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York, Penguin Books, 2016.

- Olsson, Frederik. “Male View of Women in the Beat Generation – A Study of Gender in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.” Lund University , Lund University, 2005, lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func. Accessed 30 Apr. 2017.

[mandirapattnaikwriter]

explained--The alice munro-joyce carol oates-et al controversy

If you are a writer and not living under a rock, something or the other about the Alice Munro controversy has since reached you. Do you really care about the personal being mixed with the public life of a writer, or if the creative choices are guided and informed by private relationships, or is writing, especially fiction, completely untouched by how the writer has lived their life? These are…

[tiffanie-nicole2011-blog]

The Ultimate “BOMB” Farrah Fawcett Glamor Barbie Doll re-paint by Donna Brinkley.

The most beautiful women in TV and Movie History now become Barbie Collector Dolls created by acclaimed re-paint Artist Donna Brinkley.

Farrah Leni Fawcett is known as the world’s Sexiest Star of all time… she will forever be one of Hollywood’s greatest Icons. She was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the younger of two daughters.[3] Her mother, Pauline Alice January 30, 1914 – March 4, 2005), was a homemaker, and her father, James William Fawcett (October 14, 1917 – August 23, 2010), was an oil field contractor. Her sister was Diane Fawcett Walls (October 27, 1938 – October 16, 2001), a graphic artist. She was of Irish, French, English, and Choctaw Native American ancestry. Fawcett once said the name Ferrah was made up by her mother because it went well with their last name.

A Roman Catholic, Fawcett’s early education was at the parish school of the church her family attended, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi. She graduated from W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, where she was voted Most Beautiful by her classmates her Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior years of High School. For three years, 1965–68, Fawcett attended the University of Texas at Austin, living one semester in Jester Center, and she became a sister of Delta Delta Delta Sorority. During her Freshman year, she was named one of the Ten Most Beautiful Coeds on Campus, the first time a Freshman had been chosen. Their photos were sent to various agencies in Hollywood. David Mirsch, a Hollywood agent called her and urged her to come to Los Angeles. She turned him down but he called her for the next two years. Finally, in 1968, the summer following her junior year, with her parents’ permission to try her luck in Hollywood, Farrah moved to Hollywood. She did not return.

Upon arriving in Hollywood in 1968 she was signed to a $350 a week contract with Screen Gems. She began to appear in commercials for UltraBrite toothpaste, Noxema, Max Factor, Wella Balsam shampoo and conditioner, Mercury Cougar automobiles and Beauty Rest matresses. Fawcett’s earliest acting appearances were guest spots on The Flying Nun and I Dream of Jeannie. She made numerous other TV appearances including Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, [Mayberry RFD]] and The Partridge Family. She appeared in four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man with husband Lee Majors, The Dating Game, S.W.A.T and a recurring role on Harry O alongside David Janssen. She also appeared in the Made for TV movies, The Feminist and the Fuzz, The Great American Beauty Contest, The Girl Who Came Giftwrapped, and Murder of Flight 502.

She had a sizable part in the 1969 French romantic-drama, Love Is a Funny Thing. She played opposite Raquel Welch and Mae West in the film version of, Myra Breckinridge (1970). The film earned negative reviews and was a box office flop. However, much has been written and said about the scene where Farrah and Raquel share a bed, and a near sexual experience. Fawcett co-starred with Michael York and Richard Jordan in the well-received science-fiction film, Logan’s Run in 1976.

In 1976, Pro Arts Inc., pitched the idea of a poster of Fawcett to her agent, and a photo shoot was arranged with photographer Bruce McBroom, who was hired by the poster company. According to friend Nels Van Patten, Fawcett styled her own hair and did her make-up without the aid of a mirror. Her blonde highlights were further heightened by a squeeze of lemon juice. From 40 rolls of film, Fawcett herself selected her six favorite pictures, eventually narrowing her choice to the one that made her famous. The resulting poster, of Fawcett in a one-piece red bathing suit, was a best-seller; sales estimates ranged from over 5 million[12] to 8 million to as high as 12 million copies.

On March 21, 1976, the first appearance of Fawcett playing the character Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels was aired as a movie of the week. Fawcett and her husband were frequent tennis partners of producer Aaron Spelling, and he and his producing partner thought of casting Fawcett as the golden girl Jill because of his friendship with the couple. The movie starred Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Fawcett (then billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors) as private investigators for Townsend Associates, a detective agency run by a reclusive multi-millionaire 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. They were aided in the office and occasionally in the field by two male associates, played by character actors David Doyle and David Ogden Stiers. 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 except David Ogden Stiers. Fawcett’s record-breaking poster that sold 12 million copies.

The Charlie’s Angels series formally debuted on September 22, 1976. Fawcett emerged as a fan favorite in the show, and the actress won a People’s Choice Award for Favorite Performer in a New TV Program. In a 1977 interview with TV Guide, Fawcett said: When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.

Fawcett’s appearance in the television show boosted sales of her poster, and she earned far more in royalties from poster sales than from her salary for appearing in Charlie’s Angels. Her hairstyle went on to become an international trend, with women sporting a Farrah-do a Farrah-flip, or simply Farrah hair Iterations of her hair style predominated American women’s hair styles well into the 1980s.

Fawcett left Charlie’s Angels after only one season and Cheryl Ladd replaced her on the show, portraying Jill Munroe’s younger sister Kris Munroe. Numerous explanations for Fawcett’s precipitous withdrawal from the show were offered over the years. The strain on her marriage due to her long absences most days due to filming, as her then-husband Lee Majors was star of an established television show himself, was frequently cited, but Fawcett’s ambitions to broaden her acting abilities with opportunities in films have also been given. Fawcett never officially signed her series contract with Spelling due to protracted negotiations over royalties from her image’s use in peripheral products, which led to an even more protracted lawsuit filed by Spelling and his company when she quit the show.

The show was a major success throughout the world, maintaining its appeal in syndication, spawning a cottage industry of peripheral products, particularly in the show’s first three seasons, 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. The Angels also appeared on the covers of magazines around the world, from countless fan magazines to TV Guide (four times) to Time Magazine.

The series ultimately ran for five seasons. As part of a settlement to a lawsuit over her early departure, Fawcett returned for six guest appearances over seasons three and four of the series.

In 2004, the television movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie’s Angels dramatized the events from the show with supermodel and actress Tricia Helfer portraying Fawcett and Ben Browder portraying Lee Majors, Fawcett’s then-husband.

In 1983, Fawcett won critical acclaim for her role in the Off-Broadway stage production of the controversial play Extremities, written by William Mastrosimone. Replacing Susan Sarandon, she was a would-be rape victim who turns the tables on her attacker. She described the role as the most grueling, the most intense, the most physically demanding and emotionally exhausting of her career. During one performance, a stalker in the audience disrupted the show by asking Fawcett if she had received the photos and letters he had mailed her. Police removed the man and were able only to issue a summons for disorderly conduct.

The following year, her role as a battered wife in the fact-based television movie The Burning Bed (1984) earned her the first of her four Emmy Award nominations. The project is noted as being the first television movie to provide a nationwide 800 number that offered help for others in the situation, in this case victims of domestic abuse. It was the highest-rated television movie of the season.

In 1986, Fawcett appeared in the movie version of Extremities, which was also well received by critics, and for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

She appeared in Jon Avnet’s Between Two Women with Colleen Dewhurst, and took several more dramatic roles as infamous or renowned women. She was nominated for Golden Globe awards for roles as Beate Klarsfeld in Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story and troubled Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story, and won a CableACE Award for her 1989 portrayal of groundbreaking LIFE magazine photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White in Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White. Her 1989 portrayal of convicted murderer Diane Downs in the miniseries Small Sacrifices earned her a second Emmy nomination[20] and her sixth Golden Globe Award nomination. The miniseries won a Peabody Award for excellence in television, with Fawcett’s performance singled out by the organization, which stated Ms. Fawcett brings a sense of realism rarely seen in television miniseries (to) a drama of unusual power Art meets life.

Fawcett, who had steadfastly resisted appearing nude in magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s (although she appeared topless in the 1980 film Saturn 3), caused a major stir by posing semi-nude in the December 1995 issue of Playboy.[citation needed] At the age of 50, she returned to Playboy with a pictorial for the July 1997 issue, which also became a top seller. The issue and its accompanying video featured Fawcett painting on canvas using her body, which had been an ambition of hers for years.

That same year, Fawcett was chosen by Robert Duvall to play his wife in an independent feature film he was producing, The Apostle. Fawcett received an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Actress for the film, which was highly critically acclaimed.

In 2000, she worked with director Robert Altman and an all-star cast in the feature film Dr. T the Women, playing the wife of Richard Gere (her character has a mental breakdown, leading to her first fully nude appearance). Also that year, Fawcett’s collaboration with sculptor Keith Edmier was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, later traveling to The Andy Warhol Museum. The sculpture was also presented in a series of photographs and a book by Rizzoli.

In November 2003, Fawcett prepared for her return to Broadway in a production of Bobbi Boland, the tragicomic tale of a former Miss Florida. However, the show never officially opened, closing before preview performances. Fawcett was described as vibrating with frustration at the producer’s extraordinary decision to cancel the production. Only days earlier the same producer closed an Off-Broadway show she had been backing.

Fawcett continued to work in television, with well-regarded appearances in made-for-television movies and on popular television series including Ally McBeal and four episodes each of Spin City and The Guardian, her work on the latter show earning her a third Emmy nomination in 2004.

Fawcett was married to Lee Majors, star of television’s The Six Million Dollar Man, from 1973 to 1982, although the couple separated in 1979. During her marriage, she was known and credited in her roles as Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

From 1979 until 1997 Fawcett was involved romantically with actor Ryan O’Neal. The relationship produced a son, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal, born January 30, 1985 in Los Angeles.[26] In April 2009, on probation for driving under the influence, Redmond was arrested for possession of narcotics while Fawcett was in the hospital.[citation needed] On June 22, 2009, The Los Angeles Times and Reuters reported that Ryan O’Neal had said that Fawcett had agreed to marry him as soon as she felt strong enough.

From 1997 to 1998, Fawcett had a relationship with Canadian filmmaker James Orr, writer and producer of the Disney feature film in which she co-starred with Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Man of the House. The relationship ended when Orr was charged with and later convicted of beating Fawcett during a 1998 fight between the two.

On June 5, 1997, Fawcett received negative commentary after giving a rambling interview and appearing distracted on Late Show with David Letterman. Months later, she told the host of The Howard Stern Show her behavior was just her way of joking around with the television host, partly in the guise of promoting her Playboy pictoral and video, explaining what appeared to be random looks across the theater was just her looking and reacting to fans in the audience. Though the Letterman appearance spawned speculation and several jokes at her expense, she returned to the show a week later, with success, and several years later, after Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling act on a February 2009 appearance on The Late Show, Letterman wrapped up the interview by saying, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight and recalled Fawcett’s earlier appearance by noting we owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.

Fawcett’s elder sister, Diane Fawcett Walls, died from lung cancer just before her 63rd birthday, on October 16, 2001.[33] The fifth episode of her 2005 Chasing Farrah series followed the actress home to Texas to visit with her father, James, and mother, Pauline. Pauline Fawcett died soon after, on March 4, 2005, at the age of 91.

Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, and began treatment, including chemotherapy and surgery. Four months later, on her 60th birthday, the Associated Press wire service reported that Fawcett was, at that point, cancer free.

Less than four months later, in May 2007, Fawcett brought a small digital video camera to document a doctor’s office visit. There, she was told a malignant polyp was found where she had been treated for the initial cancer. Doctors contemplated whether to implant a radiation seeder (which differs from conventional radiation and is used to treat other types of cancer). Fawcett’s U.S. doctors told her that she would require a colostomy. Instead, Fawcett traveled to Germany for treatments described variously in the press as holistic aggressive and alternative. There, Dr. Ursula Jacob prescribed a treatment including surgery to remove the anal tumor, and a course of perfusion and embolization for her liver cancer by Doctors Claus Kiehling and Thomas Vogl in Germany, and chemotherapy back in Fawcett’s home town of Los Angeles. Although initially the tumors were regressing, their reappearance a few months later necessitated a new course, this time including laser ablation therapy and chemoembolization. Aided by friend Alana Stewart, Fawcett documented her battle with the disease.

In early April 2009, Fawcett, back in the United States, was hospitalized, with media reports declaring her unconscious and in critical condition, although subsequent reports indicated her condition was not so dire. On April 6, the Associated Press reported that her cancer had metastasized to her liver, a development Fawcett had learned of in May 2007 and which her subsequent treatments in Germany had targeted. The report denied that she was unconscious, and explained that the hospitalization was due not to her cancer but a painful abdominal hematoma that had been the result of a minor procedure. Her spokesperson emphasized she was not at death’s door adding – She remains in good spirits with her usual sense of humor … She’s been in great shape her whole life and has an incredible resolve and an incredible resilience. Fawcett was released from the hospital on April 9, picked up by longtime companion O’Neal, and, according to her doctor, was walking and in great spirits and looking forward to celebrating Easter at home.

A month later, on May 7, Fawcett was reported as critically ill, with Ryan O’Neal quoted as saying she now spends her days at home, on an IV, often asleep. The Los Angeles Times reported Fawcett was in the last stages of her cancer and had the chance to see her son Redmond in April 2009, although shackled and under supervision, as he was then incarcerated. Her 91-year-old father, James Fawcett, flew out to Los Angeles to visit.

The cancer specialist that was treating Fawcett in L.A., Dr. Lawrence Piro, and Fawcett’s friend and Angels co-star Kate Jackson – a breast cancer survivor – appeared together on The Today Show dispelling tabloid-fueled rumors, including suggestions Fawcett had ever been in a coma, had ever reached 86 pounds, and had ever given up her fight against the disease or lost the will to live. Jackson decried such fabrications, saying they really do hurt a human being and a person like Farrah. Piro recalled when it became necessary for Fawcett to undergo treatments that would cause her to lose her hair, acknowledging Farrah probably has the most famous hair in the world but also that it is not a trivial matter for any cancer patient, whose hair affects [one’s] whole sense of who [they] are. Of the documentary, Jackson averred Fawcett didn’t do this to show that ‘she’ is unique, she did it to show that we are all unique … This was … meant to be a gift to others to help and inspire them.

The two-hour documentary Farrah’s Story, which was filmed by Fawcett and friend Alana Stewart, aired on NBC on May 15, 2009.[47] The documentary was watched by nearly nine million people at its premiere airing, and it was re-aired on the broadcast network’s cable stations MSNBC, Bravo and Oxygen. Fawcett earned her fourth Emmy nomination posthumously on July 16, 2009, as producer of Farrah’s Story.

Controversy surrounded the aired version of the documentary, with her initial producing partner, who had worked with her four years earlier on her reality series Chasing Farrah, alleging O’Neal’s and Stewart’s editing of the program was not in keeping with Fawcett’s wishes to more thoroughly explore rare types of cancers such as her own and alternative methods of treatment. He was especially critical of scenes showing Fawcett’s son visiting her for the last time, in shackles, while she was nearly unconscious in bed. Fawcett had generally kept her son out of the media, and his appearances were minimal in Chasing Farrah.

Fawcett died at approximately 9:28 am, PDT on June 25, 2009, in the intensive care unit of Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, with O’Neal and Stewart by her side. A private funeral was held in Los Angeles on June 30. Fawcett’s son Redmond was permitted to leave his California detention center to attend his mother’s funeral, where he gave the first reading.

The night of her death, ABC aired an hour-long special episode of 20/20 featuring clips from several of Barbara Walters’ past interviews with Fawcett as well as new interviews with Ryan O’Neal, Jaclyn Smith, Alana Stewart, and Dr. Lawrence Piro. Walters followed up on the story on Friday’s episode of 20/20. CNN’s Larry King Live planned a show exclusively about Fawcett that evening until the death of Michael Jackson several hours later caused the program to shift to cover both stories. Cher, a longtime friend of Fawcett, and Suzanne de Passe, executive producer of Fawcett’s Small Sacrifices mini-series, both paid tribute to Fawcett on the program. NBC aired a Dateline NBC special Farrah Fawcett: The Life and Death of an Angel; the following evening, June 26, preceded by a rebroadcast of Farrah’s Story in prime time. That weekend and the following week, television tributes continued. MSNBC aired back-to-back episodes of its Headliners and Legends episodes featuring Fawcett and Jackson. TV Land aired a mini-marathon of Charlie’s Angels and Chasing Farrah episodes. E! aired Michael and Farrah: Lost Icons and the The Biography Channel aired Bio Remembers: Farrah Fawcett. The documentary Farrah’s Story re-aired on the Oxygen Network and MSNBC.

Larry King said of the Fawcett phenomenon, TV had much more impact back in the ’70s than it does today. Charlie’s Angels got huge numbers every week – nothing really dominates the television landscape like that today. Maybe American Idol comes close, but now there are so many channels and so many more shows it’s hard for anything to get the audience, or amount of attention, that Charlie’s Angels got. Farrah was a major TV star when the medium was clearly dominant.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said Farrah was one of the iconic beauties of our time. Her girl-next-door charm combined with stunning looks made her a star on film, TV and the printed page.

Kate Jackson said, She was a selfless person who loved her family and friends with all her heart, and what a big heart it was. Farrah showed immense courage and grace throughout her illness and was an inspiration to those around her… I will remember her kindness, her cutting dry wit and, of course, her beautiful smile…when you think of Farrah, remember her smiling because that is exactly how she wanted to be remembered: smiling.

She is buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

The red one-piece bathing suit worn by Farrah in her famous 1976 poster was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) on February 2, 2011.[65] Said to have been purchased at a Saks Fifth Avenue store, the red Lycra suit made by the leading Australian swimsuit company Speedo, was donated to the Smithsonian by her executors and was formally presented to NMAH in Washington D.C. by her longtime companion Ryan O’Neal.[66] The suit and the poster are expected to go on temporary display sometime in 2011–12. They will be made additions to the Smithsonian’s popular culture department.

The famous poster of Farrah in a red swimsuit has been produced as a Barbie doll. The limited edition dolls, complete with a gold chain and the girl-next-door locks, have been snapped up by Barbie fans.

In 2011, Men’s Health named her one of the 100 Hottest Women of All-Time ranking her at No. 31

Posted by CelebToys on 2012-10-13 05:55:29

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The post The Ultimate “BOMB” Farrah Fawcett Glamor Barbie Doll re-paint by Donna Brinkley. appeared first on Good Info.

[tiffanie-nicole2011-blog]

Stunning Farrah Fawcett as Jill Munroe by Donna Brinkley

The most beautiful women in TV and Movie History now become Barbie Collector Dolls created by acclaimed re-paint Artist Donna Brinkley.

Farrah Leni Fawcett is known as the world’s Sexiest Star of all time… she will forever be one of Hollywood’s greatest Icons. She was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the younger of two daughters.[3] Her mother, Pauline Alice January 30, 1914 – March 4, 2005), was a homemaker, and her father, James William Fawcett (October 14, 1917 – August 23, 2010), was an oil field contractor. Her sister was Diane Fawcett Walls (October 27, 1938 – October 16, 2001), a graphic artist. She was of Irish, French, English, and Choctaw Native American ancestry. Fawcett once said the name Ferrah was made up by her mother because it went well with their last name.

A Roman Catholic, Fawcett’s early education was at the parish school of the church her family attended, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi. She graduated from W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, where she was voted Most Beautiful by her classmates her Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior years of High School. For three years, 1965–68, Fawcett attended the University of Texas at Austin, living one semester in Jester Center, and she became a sister of Delta Delta Delta Sorority. During her Freshman year, she was named one of the Ten Most Beautiful Coeds on Campus, the first time a Freshman had been chosen. Their photos were sent to various agencies in Hollywood. David Mirsch, a Hollywood agent called her and urged her to come to Los Angeles. She turned him down but he called her for the next two years. Finally, in 1968, the summer following her junior year, with her parents’ permission to try her luck in Hollywood, Farrah moved to Hollywood. She did not return.

Upon arriving in Hollywood in 1968 she was signed to a $350 a week contract with Screen Gems. She began to appear in commercials for UltraBrite toothpaste, Noxema, Max Factor, Wella Balsam shampoo and conditioner, Mercury Cougar automobiles and Beauty Rest matresses. Fawcett’s earliest acting appearances were guest spots on The Flying Nun and I Dream of Jeannie. She made numerous other TV appearances including Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, [Mayberry RFD]] and The Partridge Family. She appeared in four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man with husband Lee Majors, The Dating Game, S.W.A.T and a recurring role on Harry O alongside David Janssen. She also appeared in the Made for TV movies, The Feminist and the Fuzz, The Great American Beauty Contest, The Girl Who Came Giftwrapped, and Murder of Flight 502.

She had a sizable part in the 1969 French romantic-drama, Love Is a Funny Thing. She played opposite Raquel Welch and Mae West in the film version of, Myra Breckinridge (1970). The film earned negative reviews and was a box office flop. However, much has been written and said about the scene where Farrah and Raquel share a bed, and a near sexual experience. Fawcett co-starred with Michael York and Richard Jordan in the well-received science-fiction film, Logan’s Run in 1976.

In 1976, Pro Arts Inc., pitched the idea of a poster of Fawcett to her agent, and a photo shoot was arranged with photographer Bruce McBroom, who was hired by the poster company. According to friend Nels Van Patten, Fawcett styled her own hair and did her make-up without the aid of a mirror. Her blonde highlights were further heightened by a squeeze of lemon juice. From 40 rolls of film, Fawcett herself selected her six favorite pictures, eventually narrowing her choice to the one that made her famous. The resulting poster, of Fawcett in a one-piece red bathing suit, was a best-seller; sales estimates ranged from over 5 million[12] to 8 million to as high as 12 million copies.

On March 21, 1976, the first appearance of Fawcett playing the character Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels was aired as a movie of the week. Fawcett and her husband were frequent tennis partners of producer Aaron Spelling, and he and his producing partner thought of casting Fawcett as the golden girl Jill because of his friendship with the couple. The movie starred Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Fawcett (then billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors) as private investigators for Townsend Associates, a detective agency run by a reclusive multi-millionaire 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. They were aided in the office and occasionally in the field by two male associates, played by character actors David Doyle and David Ogden Stiers. 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 except David Ogden Stiers. Fawcett’s record-breaking poster that sold 12 million copies.

The Charlie’s Angels series formally debuted on September 22, 1976. Fawcett emerged as a fan favorite in the show, and the actress won a People’s Choice Award for Favorite Performer in a New TV Program. In a 1977 interview with TV Guide, Fawcett said: When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.

Fawcett’s appearance in the television show boosted sales of her poster, and she earned far more in royalties from poster sales than from her salary for appearing in Charlie’s Angels. Her hairstyle went on to become an international trend, with women sporting a Farrah-do a Farrah-flip, or simply Farrah hair Iterations of her hair style predominated American women’s hair styles well into the 1980s.

Fawcett left Charlie’s Angels after only one season and Cheryl Ladd replaced her on the show, portraying Jill Munroe’s younger sister Kris Munroe. Numerous explanations for Fawcett’s precipitous withdrawal from the show were offered over the years. The strain on her marriage due to her long absences most days due to filming, as her then-husband Lee Majors was star of an established television show himself, was frequently cited, but Fawcett’s ambitions to broaden her acting abilities with opportunities in films have also been given. Fawcett never officially signed her series contract with Spelling due to protracted negotiations over royalties from her image’s use in peripheral products, which led to an even more protracted lawsuit filed by Spelling and his company when she quit the show.

The show was a major success throughout the world, maintaining its appeal in syndication, spawning a cottage industry of peripheral products, particularly in the show’s first three seasons, 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. The Angels also appeared on the covers of magazines around the world, from countless fan magazines to TV Guide (four times) to Time Magazine.

The series ultimately ran for five seasons. As part of a settlement to a lawsuit over her early departure, Fawcett returned for six guest appearances over seasons three and four of the series.

In 2004, the television movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie’s Angels dramatized the events from the show with supermodel and actress Tricia Helfer portraying Fawcett and Ben Browder portraying Lee Majors, Fawcett’s then-husband.

In 1983, Fawcett won critical acclaim for her role in the Off-Broadway stage production of the controversial play Extremities, written by William Mastrosimone. Replacing Susan Sarandon, she was a would-be rape victim who turns the tables on her attacker. She described the role as the most grueling, the most intense, the most physically demanding and emotionally exhausting of her career. During one performance, a stalker in the audience disrupted the show by asking Fawcett if she had received the photos and letters he had mailed her. Police removed the man and were able only to issue a summons for disorderly conduct.

The following year, her role as a battered wife in the fact-based television movie The Burning Bed (1984) earned her the first of her four Emmy Award nominations. The project is noted as being the first television movie to provide a nationwide 800 number that offered help for others in the situation, in this case victims of domestic abuse. It was the highest-rated television movie of the season.

In 1986, Fawcett appeared in the movie version of Extremities, which was also well received by critics, and for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

She appeared in Jon Avnet’s Between Two Women with Colleen Dewhurst, and took several more dramatic roles as infamous or renowned women. She was nominated for Golden Globe awards for roles as Beate Klarsfeld in Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story and troubled Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story, and won a CableACE Award for her 1989 portrayal of groundbreaking LIFE magazine photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White in Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White. Her 1989 portrayal of convicted murderer Diane Downs in the miniseries Small Sacrifices earned her a second Emmy nomination[20] and her sixth Golden Globe Award nomination. The miniseries won a Peabody Award for excellence in television, with Fawcett’s performance singled out by the organization, which stated Ms. Fawcett brings a sense of realism rarely seen in television miniseries (to) a drama of unusual power Art meets life.

Fawcett, who had steadfastly resisted appearing nude in magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s (although she appeared topless in the 1980 film Saturn 3), caused a major stir by posing semi-nude in the December 1995 issue of Playboy.[citation needed] At the age of 50, she returned to Playboy with a pictorial for the July 1997 issue, which also became a top seller. The issue and its accompanying video featured Fawcett painting on canvas using her body, which had been an ambition of hers for years.

That same year, Fawcett was chosen by Robert Duvall to play his wife in an independent feature film he was producing, The Apostle. Fawcett received an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Actress for the film, which was highly critically acclaimed.

In 2000, she worked with director Robert Altman and an all-star cast in the feature film Dr. T the Women, playing the wife of Richard Gere (her character has a mental breakdown, leading to her first fully nude appearance). Also that year, Fawcett’s collaboration with sculptor Keith Edmier was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, later traveling to The Andy Warhol Museum. The sculpture was also presented in a series of photographs and a book by Rizzoli.

In November 2003, Fawcett prepared for her return to Broadway in a production of Bobbi Boland, the tragicomic tale of a former Miss Florida. However, the show never officially opened, closing before preview performances. Fawcett was described as vibrating with frustration at the producer’s extraordinary decision to cancel the production. Only days earlier the same producer closed an Off-Broadway show she had been backing.

Fawcett continued to work in television, with well-regarded appearances in made-for-television movies and on popular television series including Ally McBeal and four episodes each of Spin City and The Guardian, her work on the latter show earning her a third Emmy nomination in 2004.

Fawcett was married to Lee Majors, star of television’s The Six Million Dollar Man, from 1973 to 1982, although the couple separated in 1979. During her marriage, she was known and credited in her roles as Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

From 1979 until 1997 Fawcett was involved romantically with actor Ryan O’Neal. The relationship produced a son, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal, born January 30, 1985 in Los Angeles.[26] In April 2009, on probation for driving under the influence, Redmond was arrested for possession of narcotics while Fawcett was in the hospital.[citation needed] On June 22, 2009, The Los Angeles Times and Reuters reported that Ryan O’Neal had said that Fawcett had agreed to marry him as soon as she felt strong enough.

From 1997 to 1998, Fawcett had a relationship with Canadian filmmaker James Orr, writer and producer of the Disney feature film in which she co-starred with Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Man of the House. The relationship ended when Orr was charged with and later convicted of beating Fawcett during a 1998 fight between the two.

On June 5, 1997, Fawcett received negative commentary after giving a rambling interview and appearing distracted on Late Show with David Letterman. Months later, she told the host of The Howard Stern Show her behavior was just her way of joking around with the television host, partly in the guise of promoting her Playboy pictoral and video, explaining what appeared to be random looks across the theater was just her looking and reacting to fans in the audience. Though the Letterman appearance spawned speculation and several jokes at her expense, she returned to the show a week later, with success, and several years later, after Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling act on a February 2009 appearance on The Late Show, Letterman wrapped up the interview by saying, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight and recalled Fawcett’s earlier appearance by noting we owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.

Fawcett’s elder sister, Diane Fawcett Walls, died from lung cancer just before her 63rd birthday, on October 16, 2001.[33] The fifth episode of her 2005 Chasing Farrah series followed the actress home to Texas to visit with her father, James, and mother, Pauline. Pauline Fawcett died soon after, on March 4, 2005, at the age of 91.

Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, and began treatment, including chemotherapy and surgery. Four months later, on her 60th birthday, the Associated Press wire service reported that Fawcett was, at that point, cancer free.

Less than four months later, in May 2007, Fawcett brought a small digital video camera to document a doctor’s office visit. There, she was told a malignant polyp was found where she had been treated for the initial cancer. Doctors contemplated whether to implant a radiation seeder (which differs from conventional radiation and is used to treat other types of cancer). Fawcett’s U.S. doctors told her that she would require a colostomy. Instead, Fawcett traveled to Germany for treatments described variously in the press as holistic aggressive and alternative. There, Dr. Ursula Jacob prescribed a treatment including surgery to remove the anal tumor, and a course of perfusion and embolization for her liver cancer by Doctors Claus Kiehling and Thomas Vogl in Germany, and chemotherapy back in Fawcett’s home town of Los Angeles. Although initially the tumors were regressing, their reappearance a few months later necessitated a new course, this time including laser ablation therapy and chemoembolization. Aided by friend Alana Stewart, Fawcett documented her battle with the disease.

In early April 2009, Fawcett, back in the United States, was hospitalized, with media reports declaring her unconscious and in critical condition, although subsequent reports indicated her condition was not so dire. On April 6, the Associated Press reported that her cancer had metastasized to her liver, a development Fawcett had learned of in May 2007 and which her subsequent treatments in Germany had targeted. The report denied that she was unconscious, and explained that the hospitalization was due not to her cancer but a painful abdominal hematoma that had been the result of a minor procedure. Her spokesperson emphasized she was not at death’s door adding – She remains in good spirits with her usual sense of humor … She’s been in great shape her whole life and has an incredible resolve and an incredible resilience. Fawcett was released from the hospital on April 9, picked up by longtime companion O’Neal, and, according to her doctor, was walking and in great spirits and looking forward to celebrating Easter at home.

A month later, on May 7, Fawcett was reported as critically ill, with Ryan O’Neal quoted as saying she now spends her days at home, on an IV, often asleep. The Los Angeles Times reported Fawcett was in the last stages of her cancer and had the chance to see her son Redmond in April 2009, although shackled and under supervision, as he was then incarcerated. Her 91-year-old father, James Fawcett, flew out to Los Angeles to visit.

The cancer specialist that was treating Fawcett in L.A., Dr. Lawrence Piro, and Fawcett’s friend and Angels co-star Kate Jackson – a breast cancer survivor – appeared together on The Today Show dispelling tabloid-fueled rumors, including suggestions Fawcett had ever been in a coma, had ever reached 86 pounds, and had ever given up her fight against the disease or lost the will to live. Jackson decried such fabrications, saying they really do hurt a human being and a person like Farrah. Piro recalled when it became necessary for Fawcett to undergo treatments that would cause her to lose her hair, acknowledging Farrah probably has the most famous hair in the world but also that it is not a trivial matter for any cancer patient, whose hair affects [one’s] whole sense of who [they] are. Of the documentary, Jackson averred Fawcett didn’t do this to show that ‘she’ is unique, she did it to show that we are all unique … This was … meant to be a gift to others to help and inspire them.

The two-hour documentary Farrah’s Story, which was filmed by Fawcett and friend Alana Stewart, aired on NBC on May 15, 2009.[47] The documentary was watched by nearly nine million people at its premiere airing, and it was re-aired on the broadcast network’s cable stations MSNBC, Bravo and Oxygen. Fawcett earned her fourth Emmy nomination posthumously on July 16, 2009, as producer of Farrah’s Story.

Controversy surrounded the aired version of the documentary, with her initial producing partner, who had worked with her four years earlier on her reality series Chasing Farrah, alleging O’Neal’s and Stewart’s editing of the program was not in keeping with Fawcett’s wishes to more thoroughly explore rare types of cancers such as her own and alternative methods of treatment. He was especially critical of scenes showing Fawcett’s son visiting her for the last time, in shackles, while she was nearly unconscious in bed. Fawcett had generally kept her son out of the media, and his appearances were minimal in Chasing Farrah.

Fawcett died at approximately 9:28 am, PDT on June 25, 2009, in the intensive care unit of Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, with O’Neal and Stewart by her side. A private funeral was held in Los Angeles on June 30. Fawcett’s son Redmond was permitted to leave his California detention center to attend his mother’s funeral, where he gave the first reading.

The night of her death, ABC aired an hour-long special episode of 20/20 featuring clips from several of Barbara Walters’ past interviews with Fawcett as well as new interviews with Ryan O’Neal, Jaclyn Smith, Alana Stewart, and Dr. Lawrence Piro. Walters followed up on the story on Friday’s episode of 20/20. CNN’s Larry King Live planned a show exclusively about Fawcett that evening until the death of Michael Jackson several hours later caused the program to shift to cover both stories. Cher, a longtime friend of Fawcett, and Suzanne de Passe, executive producer of Fawcett’s Small Sacrifices mini-series, both paid tribute to Fawcett on the program. NBC aired a Dateline NBC special Farrah Fawcett: The Life and Death of an Angel; the following evening, June 26, preceded by a rebroadcast of Farrah’s Story in prime time. That weekend and the following week, television tributes continued. MSNBC aired back-to-back episodes of its Headliners and Legends episodes featuring Fawcett and Jackson. TV Land aired a mini-marathon of Charlie’s Angels and Chasing Farrah episodes. E! aired Michael and Farrah: Lost Icons and the The Biography Channel aired Bio Remembers: Farrah Fawcett. The documentary Farrah’s Story re-aired on the Oxygen Network and MSNBC.

Larry King said of the Fawcett phenomenon, TV had much more impact back in the ’70s than it does today. Charlie’s Angels got huge numbers every week – nothing really dominates the television landscape like that today. Maybe American Idol comes close, but now there are so many channels and so many more shows it’s hard for anything to get the audience, or amount of attention, that Charlie’s Angels got. Farrah was a major TV star when the medium was clearly dominant.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said Farrah was one of the iconic beauties of our time. Her girl-next-door charm combined with stunning looks made her a star on film, TV and the printed page.

Kate Jackson said, She was a selfless person who loved her family and friends with all her heart, and what a big heart it was. Farrah showed immense courage and grace throughout her illness and was an inspiration to those around her… I will remember her kindness, her cutting dry wit and, of course, her beautiful smile…when you think of Farrah, remember her smiling because that is exactly how she wanted to be remembered: smiling.

She is buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

The red one-piece bathing suit worn by Farrah in her famous 1976 poster was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) on February 2, 2011.[65] Said to have been purchased at a Saks Fifth Avenue store, the red Lycra suit made by the leading Australian swimsuit company Speedo, was donated to the Smithsonian by her executors and was formally presented to NMAH in Washington D.C. by her longtime companion Ryan O’Neal.[66] The suit and the poster are expected to go on temporary display sometime in 2011–12. They will be made additions to the Smithsonian’s popular culture department.

The famous poster of Farrah in a red swimsuit has been produced as a Barbie doll. The limited edition dolls, complete with a gold chain and the girl-next-door locks, have been snapped up by Barbie fans.

In 2011, Men’s Health named her one of the 100 Hottest Women of All-Time ranking her at No. 31

Posted by CelebToys on 2012-09-24 06:00:07

Tagged: , Farrah Fawcett , Charlie’s Angels , Jill Munroe , Iconic Swimsuit , Legendary Icon , The Burning Bed , Extremities , Small Sacrifices , Poor Little Rich Girl , Barbara Hutton , Murder In Texas , Lee Majors , Ryan O’Neal , Donna Brinkley , Re-paint dolls , Barbie Doll , Sex Symbol , Beautiful , Glamor , Legend , Actress , Model , Jaclyn Smith , Kate Jackson , Cheryl Ladd , Barbie Ooaks , Barbie , Barbie Dolls , Collector Dolls , Repaint Doll , The Apostle , Between Two Women , Nazi Hunter , Shelley Hack , Tanya Roberts , Cover-Girl , Classic Hollywood Beauties , Beautiful Woman , Blond Bombshell , nude , Playboy , All of Me , Cannonball Run

The post Stunning Farrah Fawcett as Jill Munroe by Donna Brinkley appeared first on Good Info.

[tiffanie-nicole2011-blog]

Sexy Farrah Fawcett Barbie by Donna Brinkley.

The most beautiful women in TV and Movie History now become Barbie Collector Dolls created by acclaimed re-paint Artist Donna Brinkley.

Farrah Leni Fawcett is known as the world’s Sexiest Star of all time… she will forever be one of Hollywood’s greatest Icons. She was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the younger of two daughters.[3] Her mother, Pauline Alice January 30, 1914 – March 4, 2005), was a homemaker, and her father, James William Fawcett (October 14, 1917 – August 23, 2010), was an oil field contractor. Her sister was Diane Fawcett Walls (October 27, 1938 – October 16, 2001), a graphic artist. She was of Irish, French, English, and Choctaw Native American ancestry. Fawcett once said the name Ferrah was made up by her mother because it went well with their last name.

A Roman Catholic, Fawcett’s early education was at the parish school of the church her family attended, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Corpus Christi. She graduated from W. B. Ray High School in Corpus Christi, where she was voted Most Beautiful by her classmates her Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior years of High School. For three years, 1965–68, Fawcett attended the University of Texas at Austin, living one semester in Jester Center, and she became a sister of Delta Delta Delta Sorority. During her Freshman year, she was named one of the Ten Most Beautiful Coeds on Campus, the first time a Freshman had been chosen. Their photos were sent to various agencies in Hollywood. David Mirsch, a Hollywood agent called her and urged her to come to Los Angeles. She turned him down but he called her for the next two years. Finally, in 1968, the summer following her junior year, with her parents’ permission to try her luck in Hollywood, Farrah moved to Hollywood. She did not return.

Upon arriving in Hollywood in 1968 she was signed to a $350 a week contract with Screen Gems. She began to appear in commercials for UltraBrite toothpaste, Noxema, Max Factor, Wella Balsam shampoo and conditioner, Mercury Cougar automobiles and Beauty Rest matresses. Fawcett’s earliest acting appearances were guest spots on The Flying Nun and I Dream of Jeannie. She made numerous other TV appearances including Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, [Mayberry RFD]] and The Partridge Family. She appeared in four episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man with husband Lee Majors, The Dating Game, S.W.A.T and a recurring role on Harry O alongside David Janssen. She also appeared in the Made for TV movies, The Feminist and the Fuzz, The Great American Beauty Contest, The Girl Who Came Giftwrapped, and Murder of Flight 502.

She had a sizable part in the 1969 French romantic-drama, Love Is a Funny Thing. She played opposite Raquel Welch and Mae West in the film version of, Myra Breckinridge (1970). The film earned negative reviews and was a box office flop. However, much has been written and said about the scene where Farrah and Raquel share a bed, and a near sexual experience. Fawcett co-starred with Michael York and Richard Jordan in the well-received science-fiction film, Logan’s Run in 1976.

In 1976, Pro Arts Inc., pitched the idea of a poster of Fawcett to her agent, and a photo shoot was arranged with photographer Bruce McBroom, who was hired by the poster company. According to friend Nels Van Patten, Fawcett styled her own hair and did her make-up without the aid of a mirror. Her blonde highlights were further heightened by a squeeze of lemon juice. From 40 rolls of film, Fawcett herself selected her six favorite pictures, eventually narrowing her choice to the one that made her famous. The resulting poster, of Fawcett in a one-piece red bathing suit, was a best-seller; sales estimates ranged from over 5 million[12] to 8 million to as high as 12 million copies.

On March 21, 1976, the first appearance of Fawcett playing the character Jill Munroe in Charlie’s Angels was aired as a movie of the week. Fawcett and her husband were frequent tennis partners of producer Aaron Spelling, and he and his producing partner thought of casting Fawcett as the golden girl Jill because of his friendship with the couple. The movie starred Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Fawcett (then billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors) as private investigators for Townsend Associates, a detective agency run by a reclusive multi-millionaire 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. They were aided in the office and occasionally in the field by two male associates, played by character actors David Doyle and David Ogden Stiers. 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 except David Ogden Stiers. Fawcett’s record-breaking poster that sold 12 million copies.

The Charlie’s Angels series formally debuted on September 22, 1976. Fawcett emerged as a fan favorite in the show, and the actress won a People’s Choice Award for Favorite Performer in a New TV Program. In a 1977 interview with TV Guide, Fawcett said: When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.

Fawcett’s appearance in the television show boosted sales of her poster, and she earned far more in royalties from poster sales than from her salary for appearing in Charlie’s Angels. Her hairstyle went on to become an international trend, with women sporting a Farrah-do a Farrah-flip, or simply Farrah hair Iterations of her hair style predominated American women’s hair styles well into the 1980s.

Fawcett left Charlie’s Angels after only one season and Cheryl Ladd replaced her on the show, portraying Jill Munroe’s younger sister Kris Munroe. Numerous explanations for Fawcett’s precipitous withdrawal from the show were offered over the years. The strain on her marriage due to her long absences most days due to filming, as her then-husband Lee Majors was star of an established television show himself, was frequently cited, but Fawcett’s ambitions to broaden her acting abilities with opportunities in films have also been given. Fawcett never officially signed her series contract with Spelling due to protracted negotiations over royalties from her image’s use in peripheral products, which led to an even more protracted lawsuit filed by Spelling and his company when she quit the show.

The show was a major success throughout the world, maintaining its appeal in syndication, spawning a cottage industry of peripheral products, particularly in the show’s first three seasons, 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. The Angels also appeared on the covers of magazines around the world, from countless fan magazines to TV Guide (four times) to Time Magazine.

The series ultimately ran for five seasons. As part of a settlement to a lawsuit over her early departure, Fawcett returned for six guest appearances over seasons three and four of the series.

In 2004, the television movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie’s Angels dramatized the events from the show with supermodel and actress Tricia Helfer portraying Fawcett and Ben Browder portraying Lee Majors, Fawcett’s then-husband.

In 1983, Fawcett won critical acclaim for her role in the Off-Broadway stage production of the controversial play Extremities, written by William Mastrosimone. Replacing Susan Sarandon, she was a would-be rape victim who turns the tables on her attacker. She described the role as the most grueling, the most intense, the most physically demanding and emotionally exhausting of her career. During one performance, a stalker in the audience disrupted the show by asking Fawcett if she had received the photos and letters he had mailed her. Police removed the man and were able only to issue a summons for disorderly conduct.

The following year, her role as a battered wife in the fact-based television movie The Burning Bed (1984) earned her the first of her four Emmy Award nominations. The project is noted as being the first television movie to provide a nationwide 800 number that offered help for others in the situation, in this case victims of domestic abuse. It was the highest-rated television movie of the season.

In 1986, Fawcett appeared in the movie version of Extremities, which was also well received by critics, and for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama.

She appeared in Jon Avnet’s Between Two Women with Colleen Dewhurst, and took several more dramatic roles as infamous or renowned women. She was nominated for Golden Globe awards for roles as Beate Klarsfeld in Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story and troubled Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story, and won a CableACE Award for her 1989 portrayal of groundbreaking LIFE magazine photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White in Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White. Her 1989 portrayal of convicted murderer Diane Downs in the miniseries Small Sacrifices earned her a second Emmy nomination[20] and her sixth Golden Globe Award nomination. The miniseries won a Peabody Award for excellence in television, with Fawcett’s performance singled out by the organization, which stated Ms. Fawcett brings a sense of realism rarely seen in television miniseries (to) a drama of unusual power Art meets life.

Fawcett, who had steadfastly resisted appearing nude in magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s (although she appeared topless in the 1980 film Saturn 3), caused a major stir by posing semi-nude in the December 1995 issue of Playboy.[citation needed] At the age of 50, she returned to Playboy with a pictorial for the July 1997 issue, which also became a top seller. The issue and its accompanying video featured Fawcett painting on canvas using her body, which had been an ambition of hers for years.

That same year, Fawcett was chosen by Robert Duvall to play his wife in an independent feature film he was producing, The Apostle. Fawcett received an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Actress for the film, which was highly critically acclaimed.

In 2000, she worked with director Robert Altman and an all-star cast in the feature film Dr. T the Women, playing the wife of Richard Gere (her character has a mental breakdown, leading to her first fully nude appearance). Also that year, Fawcett’s collaboration with sculptor Keith Edmier was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, later traveling to The Andy Warhol Museum. The sculpture was also presented in a series of photographs and a book by Rizzoli.

In November 2003, Fawcett prepared for her return to Broadway in a production of Bobbi Boland, the tragicomic tale of a former Miss Florida. However, the show never officially opened, closing before preview performances. Fawcett was described as vibrating with frustration at the producer’s extraordinary decision to cancel the production. Only days earlier the same producer closed an Off-Broadway show she had been backing.

Fawcett continued to work in television, with well-regarded appearances in made-for-television movies and on popular television series including Ally McBeal and four episodes each of Spin City and The Guardian, her work on the latter show earning her a third Emmy nomination in 2004.

Fawcett was married to Lee Majors, star of television’s The Six Million Dollar Man, from 1973 to 1982, although the couple separated in 1979. During her marriage, she was known and credited in her roles as Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

From 1979 until 1997 Fawcett was involved romantically with actor Ryan O’Neal. The relationship produced a son, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal, born January 30, 1985 in Los Angeles.[26] In April 2009, on probation for driving under the influence, Redmond was arrested for possession of narcotics while Fawcett was in the hospital.[citation needed] On June 22, 2009, The Los Angeles Times and Reuters reported that Ryan O’Neal had said that Fawcett had agreed to marry him as soon as she felt strong enough.

From 1997 to 1998, Fawcett had a relationship with Canadian filmmaker James Orr, writer and producer of the Disney feature film in which she co-starred with Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Man of the House. The relationship ended when Orr was charged with and later convicted of beating Fawcett during a 1998 fight between the two.

On June 5, 1997, Fawcett received negative commentary after giving a rambling interview and appearing distracted on Late Show with David Letterman. Months later, she told the host of The Howard Stern Show her behavior was just her way of joking around with the television host, partly in the guise of promoting her Playboy pictoral and video, explaining what appeared to be random looks across the theater was just her looking and reacting to fans in the audience. Though the Letterman appearance spawned speculation and several jokes at her expense, she returned to the show a week later, with success, and several years later, after Joaquin Phoenix’s mumbling act on a February 2009 appearance on The Late Show, Letterman wrapped up the interview by saying, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight and recalled Fawcett’s earlier appearance by noting we owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.

Fawcett’s elder sister, Diane Fawcett Walls, died from lung cancer just before her 63rd birthday, on October 16, 2001.[33] The fifth episode of her 2005 Chasing Farrah series followed the actress home to Texas to visit with her father, James, and mother, Pauline. Pauline Fawcett died soon after, on March 4, 2005, at the age of 91.

Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, and began treatment, including chemotherapy and surgery. Four months later, on her 60th birthday, the Associated Press wire service reported that Fawcett was, at that point, cancer free.

Less than four months later, in May 2007, Fawcett brought a small digital video camera to document a doctor’s office visit. There, she was told a malignant polyp was found where she had been treated for the initial cancer. Doctors contemplated whether to implant a radiation seeder (which differs from conventional radiation and is used to treat other types of cancer). Fawcett’s U.S. doctors told her that she would require a colostomy. Instead, Fawcett traveled to Germany for treatments described variously in the press as holistic aggressive and alternative. There, Dr. Ursula Jacob prescribed a treatment including surgery to remove the anal tumor, and a course of perfusion and embolization for her liver cancer by Doctors Claus Kiehling and Thomas Vogl in Germany, and chemotherapy back in Fawcett’s home town of Los Angeles. Although initially the tumors were regressing, their reappearance a few months later necessitated a new course, this time including laser ablation therapy and chemoembolization. Aided by friend Alana Stewart, Fawcett documented her battle with the disease.

In early April 2009, Fawcett, back in the United States, was hospitalized, with media reports declaring her unconscious and in critical condition, although subsequent reports indicated her condition was not so dire. On April 6, the Associated Press reported that her cancer had metastasized to her liver, a development Fawcett had learned of in May 2007 and which her subsequent treatments in Germany had targeted. The report denied that she was unconscious, and explained that the hospitalization was due not to her cancer but a painful abdominal hematoma that had been the result of a minor procedure. Her spokesperson emphasized she was not at death’s door adding – She remains in good spirits with her usual sense of humor … She’s been in great shape her whole life and has an incredible resolve and an incredible resilience. Fawcett was released from the hospital on April 9, picked up by longtime companion O’Neal, and, according to her doctor, was walking and in great spirits and looking forward to celebrating Easter at home.

A month later, on May 7, Fawcett was reported as critically ill, with Ryan O’Neal quoted as saying she now spends her days at home, on an IV, often asleep. The Los Angeles Times reported Fawcett was in the last stages of her cancer and had the chance to see her son Redmond in April 2009, although shackled and under supervision, as he was then incarcerated. Her 91-year-old father, James Fawcett, flew out to Los Angeles to visit.

The cancer specialist that was treating Fawcett in L.A., Dr. Lawrence Piro, and Fawcett’s friend and Angels co-star Kate Jackson – a breast cancer survivor – appeared together on The Today Show dispelling tabloid-fueled rumors, including suggestions Fawcett had ever been in a coma, had ever reached 86 pounds, and had ever given up her fight against the disease or lost the will to live. Jackson decried such fabrications, saying they really do hurt a human being and a person like Farrah. Piro recalled when it became necessary for Fawcett to undergo treatments that would cause her to lose her hair, acknowledging Farrah probably has the most famous hair in the world but also that it is not a trivial matter for any cancer patient, whose hair affects [one’s] whole sense of who [they] are. Of the documentary, Jackson averred Fawcett didn’t do this to show that ‘she’ is unique, she did it to show that we are all unique … This was … meant to be a gift to others to help and inspire them.

The two-hour documentary Farrah’s Story, which was filmed by Fawcett and friend Alana Stewart, aired on NBC on May 15, 2009.[47] The documentary was watched by nearly nine million people at its premiere airing, and it was re-aired on the broadcast network’s cable stations MSNBC, Bravo and Oxygen. Fawcett earned her fourth Emmy nomination posthumously on July 16, 2009, as producer of Farrah’s Story.

Controversy surrounded the aired version of the documentary, with her initial producing partner, who had worked with her four years earlier on her reality series Chasing Farrah, alleging O’Neal’s and Stewart’s editing of the program was not in keeping with Fawcett’s wishes to more thoroughly explore rare types of cancers such as her own and alternative methods of treatment. He was especially critical of scenes showing Fawcett’s son visiting her for the last time, in shackles, while she was nearly unconscious in bed. Fawcett had generally kept her son out of the media, and his appearances were minimal in Chasing Farrah.

Fawcett died at approximately 9:28 am, PDT on June 25, 2009, in the intensive care unit of Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, with O’Neal and Stewart by her side. A private funeral was held in Los Angeles on June 30. Fawcett’s son Redmond was permitted to leave his California detention center to attend his mother’s funeral, where he gave the first reading.

The night of her death, ABC aired an hour-long special episode of 20/20 featuring clips from several of Barbara Walters’ past interviews with Fawcett as well as new interviews with Ryan O’Neal, Jaclyn Smith, Alana Stewart, and Dr. Lawrence Piro. Walters followed up on the story on Friday’s episode of 20/20. CNN’s Larry King Live planned a show exclusively about Fawcett that evening until the death of Michael Jackson several hours later caused the program to shift to cover both stories. Cher, a longtime friend of Fawcett, and Suzanne de Passe, executive producer of Fawcett’s Small Sacrifices mini-series, both paid tribute to Fawcett on the program. NBC aired a Dateline NBC special Farrah Fawcett: The Life and Death of an Angel; the following evening, June 26, preceded by a rebroadcast of Farrah’s Story in prime time. That weekend and the following week, television tributes continued. MSNBC aired back-to-back episodes of its Headliners and Legends episodes featuring Fawcett and Jackson. TV Land aired a mini-marathon of Charlie’s Angels and Chasing Farrah episodes. E! aired Michael and Farrah: Lost Icons and the The Biography Channel aired Bio Remembers: Farrah Fawcett. The documentary Farrah’s Story re-aired on the Oxygen Network and MSNBC.

Larry King said of the Fawcett phenomenon, TV had much more impact back in the ’70s than it does today. Charlie’s Angels got huge numbers every week – nothing really dominates the television landscape like that today. Maybe American Idol comes close, but now there are so many channels and so many more shows it’s hard for anything to get the audience, or amount of attention, that Charlie’s Angels got. Farrah was a major TV star when the medium was clearly dominant.

Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said Farrah was one of the iconic beauties of our time. Her girl-next-door charm combined with stunning looks made her a star on film, TV and the printed page.

Kate Jackson said, She was a selfless person who loved her family and friends with all her heart, and what a big heart it was. Farrah showed immense courage and grace throughout her illness and was an inspiration to those around her… I will remember her kindness, her cutting dry wit and, of course, her beautiful smile…when you think of Farrah, remember her smiling because that is exactly how she wanted to be remembered: smiling.

She is buried at the Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

The red one-piece bathing suit worn by Farrah in her famous 1976 poster was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) on February 2, 2011.[65] Said to have been purchased at a Saks Fifth Avenue store, the red Lycra suit made by the leading Australian swimsuit company Speedo, was donated to the Smithsonian by her executors and was formally presented to NMAH in Washington D.C. by her longtime companion Ryan O’Neal.[66] The suit and the poster are expected to go on temporary display sometime in 2011–12. They will be made additions to the Smithsonian’s popular culture department.

The famous poster of Farrah in a red swimsuit has been produced as a Barbie doll. The limited edition dolls, complete with a gold chain and the girl-next-door locks, have been snapped up by Barbie fans.

In 2011, Men’s Health named her one of the 100 Hottest Women of All-Time ranking her at No. 31

Posted by CelebToys on 2012-09-25 23:00:45

Tagged: , Farrah Fawcett , Farrah , Charlie’s Angels , Sex Symbol , Barbie Doll , Barbie Ooaks , Barbie Dolls , Barbie , Extremities , Murder In Texas , Beautiful Woman , Between Two Women , Saturn 3 , The Burning Bed , Cannonball Run , Beautiful Women , Blond Bombshell , Jill Munroe , The Apostle , Playboy , All of Me , Good Sports , Re-paint Dolls , Repaint Doll , Cover-Girl , Ryan O’Neal , Jaclyn Smith , Kate Jackson , Cheryl Ladd , Shelley Hack , Tanya Roberts , Iconic , TV Icons , Iconic Swimsuit Poster

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