Farrah Fawcett’s sad march to death has become her life’s work.
The “Charlie’s Angels” beauty is going public with her heartbreaking fight with cancer, saying not a day goes by without friends reminding her that she’s dying.
“It becomes your life,” Fawcett, 62, told the Los Angeles Times in an interview conducted in August but published only yesterday. “People call, ‘How are you?’ ‘How do you feel?’ ‘We’re praying for you.’ ‘Do you still have your hair?’ ‘What do you feel like?’ “
“When every single call is that kind of call . . . it’s all you talk about. It’s all-consuming. Then, your quality of life is never the same.”
“Farrah’s Story,” a chronicle of her 2 1/2-year bout with cancer, is set to air on NBC on Friday night, and her interview with the newspaper was shot by producers for possible use in the documentary.
Fawcett was diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, and the dreaded disease has since spread to her liver.
The actress has lost her hair, and longtime boyfriend Ryan O’Neal said earlier this month that she’s bedridden and has virtually ended treatment.
During the August interview, Fawcett said she owed it to other cancer victims to bravely face down this killer disease.
“I’m holding onto the hope that there is some reason that I got cancer and there is something — that may not be very clear to me right now — but that I will do,” Fawcett said.
In the documentary, Fawcett further explained why it’s so important to take her battle public. “As much as I would have liked to have kept my cancer private, I now realize that I have a certain responsibility to those who are fighting their own fights and may be able to benefit from learning about mine,” she said.
Fawcett told the LA Times that she was particularly miffed with a December 2006 tabloid headline that announced she wanted to die as soon as possible: “Farrah Begs: ‘Let Me Die.’ ” In the Times interview, Fawcett angrily denied ever uttering those white-flag words.
“God, I would never say something like that,” she said. “To think that people who did look up to me and felt positive because I was going through it, too, and yet I was strong . . . it just negated all that.”
Even as Fawcett brings her final days to newspaper pages and national TV, the iconic beauty complained about intrusive coverage of her personal life. Paparazzi earlier this year tailed Fawcett all the way to Germany, where she had sought treatment.
She pitched a fit in March, when she returned to LAX, where photographers showed up again to greet and take pictures of the actress using a wheelchair to get off the plane.
“I’m a private person,” Fawcett said. “I’m shy about people knowing things. And I’m really shy about my medical [care].”
“It would be good if I could just go and heal and then when I decided to go out, it would be OK,” she added.
The intense interest in Fawcett’s health prompted the ex-“Charlie’s Angels” star to become a real-life gumshoe and work to plug leaks about her medical records. After Fawcett’s doctor at UCLA Medical Center told her the cancer had spread in May 2007, they agreed to write that sensitive information in her file, but promised not to say another word about it — not even to her family and friends.
“I set it up with the doctor,” Fawcett said. “I said, ‘OK, you know and I know’ . . . I knew that if it came out, it was coming from UCLA.”
And sure enough, word leaked out within days and prompted a probe that found at least one employee at UCLA Medical Center was snooping into her files. “I couldn’t believe how fast it came out,” Fawcett said. “Maybe four days.”