Farrah Fawcett was already in her late twenties when it happened. That poster. The beginning and the end.

A bit-part actress of blue-collar Texas stock, hoping to make it big in LA, she posed for the shot in 1976 — a red one-piece bathing suit, sun-bleached curls and a knockout lipgloss smile.

The poster became a phenomenon, selling 12 million copies. Fawcett became a poster girl, literally, for an age starved of pre-feminist pin-ups. Marilyn Monroe was no more and when Jane Fonda stood up for the North Vietnamese in 1972 the era of the bombshell was officially over. Fawcett changed all that in a single smiling frame.

Later that year she arrived on the set of a TV show, Charlie’s Angels, an instant pop icon. During a single season on that ground-breaking glamour cops series she became a standard bearer for a new version of femininity — the high kicking, karate-chopping action babe. Given her now renowned “Farrah Flick” hairstyle, and teamed with the equally glamorous, though somehow always overshadowed, Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, she performed through risible dialogue and slyly exploitative “jiggle shots” to become the face and the hair of the year’s No 1 rated TV show.

And yet she wanted more. She left the show after only one season, determined to ride the crest of the frenzied Farrah wave that was sweeping the nation. Typically, it proved an uphill and lifelong battle. The tyranny of that poster image was often overwhelming. A Dorian Gray-style struggle, with a Faustian twist, her professional life became an attempt to defy the good-time girl in the red bathing suit. She played a rape victim off Broadway in Extremities and she won an Emmy for playing a battered, de-glamorised wife in The Burning Bed. Even when she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in the movie version of Extremities, in 1986, she remained, to many, the poster girl.

In later life she delivered fine performances in small movies such as The Apostle, and Robert Altman’s 2000 drama Dr T and The Women. In the latter movie there was something painfully poignant about her character, Kate, a former beauty on the verge of a nervous breakdown, desperate for affection and respect.

Her final gruelling performance — filming her failing battle with cancer in the television specialFarrah’s Story — was her idea, and her commitment.

That it was watched, when broadcast last month, by more than nine million Americans was proof at last that the poster girl was no more, and that Farrah Fawcett was finally, and briefly, seen.

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