It’s 50 years since Smith joined TV’s bikini-clad crime fighters alongside Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson. She talks about the love she found on set, the harassment she endured off it and the drug-taking she did her best to ignore
For a TV show that only ran for five years, Charlie’s Angels packs a punch like a bikini-wearing big-hair-flicking private investigator. “We never thought we’d be talking about it 50 years later,” says Jaclyn Smith, the only original Angel to make it to the end of the show’s run. Smith, 80, has now written a memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Called Charlie – she is not, you gather, the type of actor to want to distance herself from her defining project.
As I read her book, and speak to her over Zoom, she comes across as sensible, hardworking and optimistic. Also lucky: loving and supportive parents, agents who seem to appear from nowhere and offer her work, an early hit show, a gift for making friends and getting over heartbreak. Even when she was diagnosed with breast cancer more than 20 years ago, terrifying as it was, it was caught early and successfully treated. Her positive outlook seems to extend to the excesses of US TV in the 1970s and 80s (drug use on set only gets a brief mention); her three ex-husbands get off fairly lightly; and any difficulties – her OCD, the men who stalked her at the height of her fame – are not dwelled on.
