When she appeared with her co-stars from the original Charlie’s Angels at the Emmy awards a few weeks ago, the showbusiness pages were full of admiring comments about how fabulous she looked. Now Farrah Fawcett’s friends in Hollywood are rallying round to help the 59-year-old actress fight cancer. Fawcett, according to reports, has had a tumour removed from her lower intestine and faces chemotherapy.

The most famous of the original Angels, Fawcett (the blonde one) was a huge Seventies sex symbol and is regularly found on magazine lists of the greatest pin-ups of all time. The calendar in which she posed in a red swimsuit sold eight million copies. She is one of an exclusive club, including Jennifer Aniston, who have had a hairstyle named after her. She has said that she has spent much of her life since “fighting the image of the blonde who is all teeth and hair”.

She was born into a Roman Catholic family in Texas in 1947 and her looks earned her unwanted attention from an early age. She was just seven when she escaped an attempted rape by an older boy. At the University of Austin students used to check her timetable to be in the right place to ogle her as she walked by. When she moved to Hollywood she quickly found work and in 1973 married Lee Majors, who soon became the Six Million Dollar Man. She also made some appearances in the hit show and then Aaron Spelling cast her in Charlie’s Angels. She is so famous for her role that it seems astonishing that she starred in only one season and six episodes before quitting in a disagreement about merchandising. She went on to do numerous films, including Logan’s Run, Saturn 3 and Cannonball Run and then, in the Eighties, built up her acting credibility by playing battered women in The Burning Bed and Extremities.

There were tough times on the personal front in the Nineties. She split from Ryan O’Neal, her partner of 17 years (she was divorced from Majors in 1980). She and O’Neal have a son. In the wake of the break-up, when she was pushing 50, she posed for Playboy (selling four million copies of the magazine) and covered her naked body in gold paint for a bizarre soft-core Playboy film with artistic pretensions. She made an infamous, mumbling, disorientated appearance on the David Letterman show.

In 1998 her new boyfriend, James Orr, was given three years’ probation and community service in a battered women’s shelter after they had a fight. O’Neal is now reportedly looking after her as she faces her latest ordeal. She once said: “God only gives you as much as you can handle, and he must think I am really strong.”