Word: fawcett
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cultural historians could have predicted the ebbing of Fawcett's impact, for the thing about America is that it always imagines itself as young and beautiful - but the icons it chooses to emblematize that beauty are bound to age. Luster tarnishes, even on a golden girl. And the popular media are restless beasts; their attention can fix on one object for only so long. In time, about a year, Farrahmania faded. Fans and tabloid editors turned off the Fawcett and found some other darling; it might have been Travolta. She quit Charlie's Angels, hoping for movie stardom...
...Monarch of Melodrama So she changed careers and became an actress. For much of the '80s, Fawcett was the monarch of the TV-movie biopics, spinning plausible impersonations of heiress Barbara Hutton, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White and Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld. In the 1984 The Burning Bed, she earned an Emmy nomination (her first of three) as a real-life battered woman who sets the rack of her shame on fire, with her abusive husband in it. She took a similar part - another woman who exacts vengeance from the man who raped her - in William Mastrosimone's off-Broadway play...
...identified with suffering women was Fawcett that she could lend suspense to another true-life horror story, the 1989 Small Sacrifices, in which she's a mother bringing her three injured children to a hospital, claiming they were attacked by a "bushy-haired man." (The woman had assaulted the children herself.) The actress snagged another Emmy nomination for this bold emotional about-face...
...that Fawcett's allure decayed noticeably in her middle years. Her fine features and figure, augmented by the subtlest surgery, allowed her to defy age and gravity. That was evident when she posed nude for a portfolio in the December 1995 Playboy, the magazine's best-selling issue of the '90s, and in Robert Altman's Dr. T & the Women (2000) she played a mad housewife who walks naked through a mall fountain. She kept making films, and for The Apostle, as the frazzled wife of preacher Robert Duvall, she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award instead...
...into notoriety, as in her 1997 gig with David Letterman, during which her chatter was so giggly and addled that it gave rise to reports, never substantiated, of drug use. (Early this year, after enduring Joaquin Phoenix's epic of incoherence, Letterman said, "We owe an apology to Farrah Fawcett.") A post-Majors boyfriend, screenwriter James Orr, was charged with battering her for rejecting his marriage proposal. And she somehow endured a mostly on-again quarter-century relationship with the legendarily truculent Ryan O'Neal, once the charming star of Love Story, later the provocateur of so much domestic misery...