I cried my eyes out tonight watching "Farah's Story" on NBC. I lost my mom to cancer this time last year. It brought back so many memories.
My first thought was "Wow must be nice to be able to fly to Germany every week for treatment" Then I realized, You cant fault the women for what she has and wanting to save her life. I wound up crying like a baby by the end. She laying in the hospital dying right now. She was such an icon as I was growing up. She was a part of my childhood. It so sad.
News on Farah as of one hour ago:
She was the quintessential poster girl of the '70s, a pulse-quickening new-age sex kitten with a trend-setting mane of blonde curls and sleek curves that went on for days.
Today, the leggy tanned California girl of Charlie's Angels fame is a fragile, bird-like shadow of that once radiant woman, her face gaunt, her body shrunken, the golden curls long gone, a victim of chemical warfare.
Today, actress Farrah Fawcett is dying, bedridden and on intravenous in a Los Angeles hospital, her treatment for terminal anal cancer suspended.
And as family and friends take turns at her bedside and as the paparrazzi hold their own ghoulish vigil outside, the 62-year-old Fawcett, as she has from the time of her September 2006 diagnosis, is airing the good, the bad and the ugly of her losing battle on film.
Farrah's Story, an intimate two-hour documentary premiering tonight on NBC, was shot and produced by her friend, Rod Stewart's ex-wife Alana Hamilton, and was footage originally captured as a way for Fawcett to keep track of what doctors were telling her.
She fought the disease hard, and quietly, travelling six times to Germany for alternative treatments that included chemotherapy and laser surgery. The camera was with her in the spring of 2007, when she thought she had it beaten, and it was with her when the cancer returned and spread to her liver and she was vomiting into a bedpan, insisting filming continue because "this is what cancer is."
To say that this is the role of Fawcett's life is on some level appropriate, but it is also to undermine an on-screen talent that was often ignored by the industry and her peers.
Yes, her most famous legacy will be that iconic swimsuit pinup poster, of which a record 12 million copies were sold, and she will always be known as the wife of Lee Majors and then the long-time girlfriend of Ryan O'Neal and mother of their troubled 24-year-old son Redmond.
But beyond the cheesy cartoon character she played on Charlie's Angels were tough serious roles in which Fawcett shone, most notably her critically acclaimed Emmy-nominated turn as a battered wife in the 1984 TV movie The Burning Bed, the true story of an abused woman who set her husband on fire while he was asleep.
And, now comes this, her own dark drama.
The personal death documentary, if you will, has been done before.
Twenty years ago, in Vancouver, Dr. Peter Jepson-Young became one of the first sufferers to put a personal face on AIDS, chronicling his physical deterioration in an on-air diary that ran on CBC-TV for two years and 111 instalments until his death in November 1992.
Earlier this year, British reality star Jane Goody invited the press to record her decline from cervical cancer.
The 27-year-old, who died in March and who put the millions she earned from interviews into a trust fund for her two young sons, was both praised and derided for her mortality-by-media decision.
Be it self-exploitive or cathartic, the Goody controversy prompted thousands of young women to take cancer screening tests, reversing a long-time trend in Britain. The raised awareness story was the same in the U.S., after actor Patrick Swayze, who is still battling the disease, was diagnosed in January 2008 with terminal pancreatic cancer.
That Farrah Fawcett has opted for so public a curtain call will likely be a source of debate long past her death.
But, as she explains in one clip from the documentary: "This film is very personal. At the time, I didn't know if anybody would ever see it. But at some point, the footage took on a life of its own and dictated that it be seen."
It would take much courage to be so open and honestly raw about one's death, a role for which no one, not even an good actor, can prepare.
O'Neal, who has been by her side throughout, recently told People magazine:
"I won't know this world without her. It's a love story. I just don't know how to play this one."
There are reports that on Mother's Day, Fawcett handed O'Neal a note that said, simply: "I'm happy. I'm ready."
Sadly, it is by starring in her own death that Farrah Fawcett may finally find redemption.
sfralic@vancouversun.com
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Farah's Story
and so am I!!!!!
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