With blonde hair tumbling down over her shoulders, perfect teeth and sensational figure, Farrah Fawcett swept to fame during the 1970s as America’s No 1 pin-up. A poster in which she wore a red one-piece swimsuit sold six million copies in a few months and made her one of the best-known faces, and bodies, in the country.

In the same year (1976) she was a founder member of Charlie’s Angels, a glossy piece of television escapism in which she was one of a trio of impossibly glamorous women solving crimes for an unseen boss. Fawcett, billed as Fawcett-Majors after her marriage to the actor Lee Majors, played the sporty, giggly Jill Munroe.

The poster made her a millionaire and Charlie’s Angels gave her even more exposure, not least abroad. But she lasted for only one season. The series had spawned an array of merchandise, including Farrah dolls, T-shirts, wigs and posters, and she wanted a percentage. The show’s executives called her bluff and she walked out.

To abandon such a successful show was a huge risk but although Fawcett never appeared in such a high-profile vehicle again her celebrity remained undiminished. For years afterwards whatever she did made news, whether it was the revelations of a troubled private life or appearing naked on a video to mark her 50th birthday.

Interviewers trying to get to the heart of her were usually frustrated. She seemed naive, even a little loopy. She once said: “I like to be kooky as long as no one thinks I am in the cuckoo house.” A rambling, incoherent appearance on the David Letterman show in the 1990s suggested to many who saw it that she was either drunk or on drugs. She was probably only being herself.

She was born into a Roman Catholic family in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1947, the daughter of an oil contractor. In 1965, aged 18, she enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin to study art and was soon turning the heads of her fellow students. Her studies were cut short when a Hollywood publicist saw her picture and persuaded her to move to Los Angeles. She was soon making $1,000 a week from adverts for skin cream and toothpaste and appearing on countless magazine covers.

Film roles, mostly decorative, followed, but the acting breakthrough came in television. In 1973 she married Lee Majors, star of the popular science fiction series, The Six Million Dollar Man, which started at about the same time. Fawcett, by now Fawcett-Majors, took guest roles in four episodes. This helped to secure her casting in Charlie’s Angels.

In the original trio, Fawcett’s bubbly, athletic blonde was a foil to the more down-to-earth characters played by the brunettes, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith.

Her abrupt departure, and replacement by Cheryl Ladd, led to a lawsuit, the outcome of which was that she agreed to reappear in half a dozen later episodes.

She later appeared in a number of films, perhaps most memorably as a naive tree-hugging photographer, Pamela Glover, in the hit chase movie comedy The Cannonball Run (1981). In the film she sets out to protect trees from the participants of an illegal road race across America but ends up being kidnapped to travel in the souped-up Dodge Tradesman ambulance of Burt Reynolds and his schizophrenic sidekick Dom DeLuise. Chaos ensues as the ambulance and other racers, including bratpackers Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin as priests and Roger Moore in a send-up of his James Bond role, dodge the authorities to get to the finish line.

She was also prepared to abandon her glamorous image to star in a number of films about domestic violence. In a notable TV movie, The Burning Bed (1984), she played a battered wife who avenges her husband by killing him in a house fire. A much-praised performance as a rape victim in an off-Broadway play was repeated in the film Extremities (1986). She was a poor white mother accused of killing her children in another TV movie, Small Sacrifices (1989).

In 1997 she starred with Robert Duvall in The Apostle, a film written and directed by Duvall in which he was a preacher taking violent revenge on the lover of his wife (Fawcett). She went on to appear in Robert Altman’s Dr T and the Women (2000), as the estranged wife of Richard Gere’s gynaecologist, a woman who has retreated into a childlike state. A nude scene demonstrated that at 53 her body was still in fine shape. She was the mother of a Down’s syndrome baby in the TV movie Jewel.