US actress Farrah Fawcett, the "Charlie's Angels" television star, died on Thursday after a long battle with cancer. She was 62.
Her death in a Los Angeles hospital came just six weeks after the TV broadcast in May of a video diary she made chronicling her battle with cancer and her final months.
Called Farrah's Story, the documentary was effectively a self-penned obituary by the actress, who was bedridden by the time it was shown.
Long time companion, actor Ryan O'Neal, said in a statement: "Although this is an extremely difficult time for her family and friends, we take comfort in the beautiful times that we shared with Farrah over the years and the knowledge that her life brought joy to so many people around the world."
Fawcett started guest-starring on TV in the late 1960s and appeared on the television hit The Six Million Dollar Man. She married the show's star, Lee Majors, in 1974. The couple divorced in the early 1980s.
Her career took off thanks to a poster of her posing flirtatiously with a brilliant smile in a red one-piece bathing suit. It sold millions of copies and led to her being cast in 1976 in Charlie's Angels.
She earned critical acclaim in later roles which included a battered wife in 1984's The Burning Bed, for which she received the first of three Emmy nominations.
The off-Broadway play and subsequent film Extremities, in which Fawcett played a woman who takes revenge on a would-be attacker, earned one of her six Golden Globe nominations.
