Actress Farrah Fawcett (file)

Hollywood actress Farrah Fawcett, a glamorous face on television in the 1970s series Charlie's Angels, has died in Los Angeles at age 62.  The actress succumbed to cancer after a two-and-a-half-year battle.

Farrah Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1947 and got her start as a model and actress in television commercials.  By the late 1960s, she was getting small roles in network series.

Her big break came in 1976, when she was hired to play Jill Munroe - one of three glamorous crime-fighters in the series Charlie's Angels.   

She stayed with the show for just one season, but with her stunning good looks, she became a Hollywood icon.  A poster of Fawcett posed seductively in a swim suit sold millions of copies.

She was never successful on the big screen, and had a major movie flop in 1978 called Somebody Killed Her Husband.  Accepting more serious roles in the 1980s and 1990s, Fawcett won acclaim for a number of television films, playing a battered wife in The Burning Bed and a murderous mother in Small Sacrifices.  She also appeared in a New York play called Extremities, and starred in a film version of that story of a rape victim.

Fawcett married the actor Lee Majors in 1973; the couple divorced nine years later.  She started a relationship with actor Ryan O'Neal, and the two had a son in 1985.

O'Neal and Fawcett split up in 1997, and had an on-and-off relationship since then.  O'Neal was said to be at Fawcett's side when she died, along with her friend, actress Alana Stewart.

In 2006, Fawcett revealed she suffered from anal cancer.  She underwent treatment and the disease appeared to be in remission, but it returned the following year.

Her battle against cancer was depicted in a 2008 documentary called A Wing and a Prayer, which chronicled her travels to Germany for unconventional treatments, and another documentary released this May called, Farrah's Story.