Farrah was such a hot commodity during her “one-season-stint” on “Charlie’s Angels” – she was the object of a rather intense mania in the 1976-1977 season. Why was she unable to parlay that popularity into a more successful movie career?
I suspect that, at that time, she was seen as a sex symbol, and lacking in acting chops. Also, the first few movies she made after leaving Charlie’s Angels were dogs, and seemed to be relying on her presence to attract interest.
That said, when she made the TV movie The Burning Bed in 1984, she received quite a bit of critical acclaim, from critics who were very pleasantly surprised at how good she was in it.
How long passed between that and the talk show circuit tour she did to promote her body painting* while obviously gooned out of her mind? If there was any chance of her being taken seriously as an actor at that point, I think that pretty much incinerated it.
*Not the sort of “body painting” that might be considered marginally creative, but covering herself in cheap latex paint and transferring it directly to a canvas by pressing her body against it.
Google says 13 years of not too much of interest.
I take it you’ve never seen Saturn 3?
Her fellow TV blond sex symbol with a contract dispute, Suzanne Somers, did not make people forget Sandra Bernhardt either. Although ultimately she did have a successful TV show with Patrick Duffy and made millions with Thighmaster.
There is a difference between being popular on TV because you don’t wear a bra and getting people to pay money to see you in a theatre in a murder mystery or scifi film.
At the time of Farrah entering the feature film biz, there were a number of articles decrying the lack of good female roles in the movies. Looking back lots of the famous films were wither all male or male dominated: both Godfathers, The Sting, French connection, Jaws, Star Wars, All the President’s Men. Faye Dunaway was considered to be the only big actress left. Why this happened, I do not know. Did the demise of the studio system that enabled Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and others cause this or is that coincidence? Fawcett may have just had bad luck
But yeah, I have seen “Saturn 3” and I wish I could get that hour and half of my life back. It wouldn’t pass the muster as a “Made for Syfy movie”
She isn’t the only example of women who were promoted as sex symbols, but who never broke out to become major stars. There’s also Raquel Welch and Kathy Ireland. Both had careers, but never made it to super stardom.
Certainly that was a part of it. The studios would manage the actress’s career to build them into stars. Once the system was gone, the women were on their own. A studio would develop projects for Fawcett that would fit her talents and allow her to succeed. It’s harder to do that on your own, since even with a great agent, you need to have other people decide to hire you – and they aren’t interested in developing a career as much as they are making a hit film.
In Farrah’s case, you also have to factor in the misogynist attitudes of her then-husband Lee Majors, star of “the Six Million Dollar Man.” Lee felt threatened that his wife was eclipsing his own fame, and demanded that she leave the show “for the good of their marriage.” He didn’t leave his show to save their marriage.
In all fairness, I suppose even the most open-minded husband might have a problem knowing that every hetero teenage boy in the country was masturbating to a pin-up of his wife. But apparently, Lee was a king-sized jackass and it was intimated that Farrah did not have to do a lot of research for her role as a battered wife in “Burning Bed.”
At the time she was on “Angels,” much was made of a clause in Farrah’s contract specifiying that she be allowed to go home from work every day at 5:00pm sharp so that she could cook dinner for her husband. This was actually touted by ABC as a sign of how wholesome and all-American the three Angels were; in hindsight it looks pretty controlling on Lee’s part.
That said, I do recall that her first post-Angels movie “Somebody Killed Her Husband” was jokingly referred to as “Somebody Killed Her Career” by critics. And it’s not as if Farrah’s post-Angels career was anything special. For every George Clooney who makes the leap from TV star to movie star, there are dozens of actors like Jeff Conaway, Shelley Long, David Caruso, and Suzanne Somers who bolt ship only to go nowhere.
To be fair, Sandra Bernhard was pretty much forgotten by 1990 anyway.
Who says there has to be a compelling reason that ANY television star’s career fades after he/she leaves a popular series?
Henry Winkler was as big a TV star in the Seventies as Farrah, and he tried to make movies too… but his movies mostly flopped. He was luckier (or smarter) than Farrah in that he stayed with his popular TV series to the end.
A lot of very popular TV stars failed to make the transition to movie stardom. David Caruso, Suzanne Somers, Tom Selleck, both Ted Danson and Shelley Long… sometimes there’s a spefici explanation for their failure, but sometimes, well, that’s just show business. Even if you’re talented and successful, unemployment and obscurity are always waiting around the bend. And in the end, some of them learn that there’s something to be said for a steady TV gig.
Farrah DID have some acting chops. Check her out as Robert Duvall’s wife in the excellent The Apostle. It’s a shame more people didn’t see this fine movie!
The ONLY reason I snuck into this R-rated movie in my young teen years was for the chance to see FFM naked. One side-boob was it–plus the top of Kirk Douglass’ ass-crack. Not a fair trade at all…
I’ll note that it was made 20 years after she left Charlie’s Angels. I suspect that she developed her acting skills later in her career, once she was past her pin-up days, when she could get work on her looks alone.
I think that’s a reflection more on TV stardom rather than movie stardom in that the former is viewed as more ephemeral than the latter. In Hollywood, TV fame is considered like phosphorus: it burns very bright and very hot but it also burns very quickly. Thus, it’s not uncommon for stars of popular TV shows to drop off the pop culture radar once they either leave the series or their show goes off the air. Movie fame, in contrast, is considered (perhaps unfairly and inaccurately) more substantial and longer-lasting. That’s why many actors who achieve success on a TV show almost immediately try to make a break for movies once the opportunity arises.
Incidentally, Farrah Fawcett’s career is kind of an exception to the usual instances of actor-becomes-big-TV-star-but-flops-in-movies because her one season on Charlie’s Angels made her more than a TV star, it made her a 1970s pop culture icon. She was one of the last (if not the last) big sex symbols and on that basis, she managed to stay in the public eye for the rest of her life regardless of how well her movies or later TV shows did.
I’ve said this before. Failure is the norm in acting careers; success is the rare exception. Most actors never have any success at all and they’re basically invisible. The ones we notice are the few that have a single success but then never repeat it.
But let’s face it, there’s a HUGE amount of sheer dumb luck involved.
Look at a different 70s TV icon who (eventually) had a very successful movie career: Robin Williams.
His first few years as a movie star were, to put it mildly, underwhelming. Anybody watch Popeye, or The Survivors, or ***Club Paradise ***lately? Didn’t think so.
Robin eventually made some very good movies, and is now seen as a success. But if things hadn’t gotten better, starting with Good Morning, Vietnam, Robin might be on SDMB lists of TV stars who flopped when they tried to make movies.
Do we know for sure that Henry Winkler couldn’t have had a solid movie career if he’d picked better roles or better projects? What if Tom Selleck HAD been able to star in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
A lot of TV stars who flopped in movies probably COULD have thrived, given the right roles. Then again, a lot of waitresses and cab drivers probably could thrive in movies if they got the right roles.
Guilty. Many, many times as a teenage boy. 
I generally agree but must take a slight exception to the inclusion of Robin Williams. Williams had an advantage over actors like Winkler and Selleck because he was also a hugely successful stand-up comic. Even if Williams’ film career hadn’t worked out, he still would’ve been able to maintain his popularity by continuing to do occasional comedy tours and pay-cable specials (much like Jerry Seinfeld now).
Your selective cherry-picking is, to put it mildly, disingenuous. Anybody remember Moscow on the Hudson and The World According to Garp, which were also made in that same time period you selected?
His movie career was not DOA until Vietnam–he had already made several good movies, but was also guilty of making a lot of movies, so of course some of them would be bad.
Disingenous, my foot.
Robin was not an utter flop as a movie actor before 1987, but he sure wasn’t a bankable star. In a similar way, Tom Selleck wasn’t an utter failure as a movie actor (***Three Men and A Baby ***was a hit, lame as it was), but most of his movies were forgettable (Lasseter, High Road to China, et al.) and didn’t earn big bucks.
Robin was different from many other TV actors, of course, as he wasn’t a conventional actor or a conventional comedian. He was sometimes good in ordinary dramatic or comedy roles, but those roles usually didn’t give him a chance to show his more unique talents.