Farrah Fawcett

One of the most iconic entertainment figures of the 1970s, Farrah Fawcett was an American actress who burst onto the pop culture scene as the bathing suit-clad subject of a best-selling poster. Her image - impossibly fresh-faced, toothsome and glowing with confidence and casual sex appeal - boosted her fledgling acting career and was almost as critical to her superstardom as her turn as one of a trio of "three little girls who went to the police academy " in Aaron Spelling's action series "Charlie's Angels" (ABC, 1976-1981). At the peak of her fame and after only one season, she departed the series in 1977 with the intention of making a name in feature films, but the results were not always what she had hoped for. Determined to prove the naysayers wrong in the early 1980s, she began surprising fans and critics alike with a string of intense and unglamorous roles in plays, independent features and television movies like "The Burning Bed" (1984), "Extremities" (1985), and "Small Sacrifices" (1989). In 2006 and 2007, Fawcett generated international headlines again with the revelation that she was undergoing treatment for cancer - the third of the three original Angels to confront this disease. Her long battle, poignantly documented in the public's last glimpse of the icon, "Farrah's Story" (NBC, 2009), came to an end on June 25, 2009 when Fawcett, 62, died in Los Angeles with family and friends by her bedside.