He was the man who could not be killed, rebuilt, or slowed down — on screen, at least. Off screen, one phone call destroyed everything he had built, and he never told anyone the full story. Until now. At 87, Lee Majors has finally said out loud what he spent decades keeping to himself.
Not about the fame, not about the roles, not about the three decades of television that made him a household name across seventy countries. About a woman. About a marriage that looked perfect from the outside and felt like something slipping through his fingers from the inside. And about the moment he made a single, ordinary request of someone he trusted — a request so small it barely registered at the time — that changed everything.
To understand what he lost, you first have to understand what it took to build a life worth losing something that precious. Because Lee Majors did not start with advantages. Harvey Lee Yeary was born on April 23, 1939, in Wyandotte, Michigan. His father died in a steel mill accident before he was born.
His mother was killed by a drunk driver when he was eighteen months old. By the time he was two, he was an orphan — raised by an aunt and uncle in Middlesboro, Kentucky who gave him everything except the truth about where he came from. He found that out as a teenager, alone in the house, from a box of old newspaper clippings in the attic. Most people would have unraveled.
Lee Majors made a decision instead: he would never give the people who chose him a reason to regret it. He chose the name Lee Majors from his football idol, Johnny Majors. He became a standout athlete at Middlesboro High School, earning a football scholarship to Indiana University, then transferring to Eastern Kentucky University. But a back injury ended his athletic career.
He moved to Los Angeles, found his way into acting classes, and at twenty-five beat out more than four hundred other actors — including Burt Reynolds — for the role of Heath Barkley in The Big Valley. Four seasons alongside Barbara Stanwyck, who taught him the three things that mattered: be on time, know your lines, hit your mark and keep your mouth shut.
He has been repeating those words for fifty years because they are the ones that actually held. His first marriage — to Kathy Robinson, a fellow student at Eastern Kentucky — ended in 1964, not long after he moved to Los Angeles to chase acting. They had a son, Lee Majors II.
The marriage did not survive the distance and the financial strain of a young actor trying to make something from nothing. Kathy took their son back to Kentucky, Lee stayed in California. The gap between him and his firstborn never fully closed, and he has rarely spoken about it — which is itself a kind of answer. During the mid-sixties, while The Big Valley was making him a recognizable face, he dated actress Patti Chandler for roughly three years.
She appeared in an episode of the show. He housed her pet boa constrictor at his California ranch. He was, by all accounts, attentive and generous. That relationship ran its course. There was also, briefly, Sally Field — neither of them ever addressed it directly, but Lee gave the game away in 1981 when he recorded the theme song for The Fall Guy and sang the line: “I’ve been on fire with Sally Field.
” He delivered it with the self-deprecating grin of a man who understood that humor was the most graceful way to acknowledge certain things. Sally went on to marry Steven Craig in 1968. Lee, that same year, was about to meet the woman who would define the next chapter of his life — and the chapter after that, and in some ways every chapter since. His agent showed him photographs of his newest clients and told him to pick the best-looking girl. Lee looked at the photographs and made his choice without hesitation. The agent called her.
Her name was Farrah Fawcett, twenty-one years old, freshly arrived from Corpus Christi, Texas, with no credits and no connections and a face that made people stop mid-sentence. Their first date was not a success.
Farrah ordered a scotch and coke, had no experience with alcohol, and quickly became ill. Lee sat across from her uncertain whether she disliked him or simply disliked drinking. The following morning he sent thirteen yellow roses. She agreed to see him again. When he came to pick her up, she told People magazine years later, she “melted into a thousand pieces.” It was love at first sight, she said.
That tends to happen when someone sends thirteen yellow roses after watching you get sick on a first date. What they found in each other was a shared foundation — two Southerners who had come to Los Angeles carrying ambitions that the people back home found slightly puzzling. She called him “big grump-head.” Before her career took off she made sure to be home in time to cook dinner.
She was, as she later described it herself, “a very compliant person who just wanted to cook his meals, clean his house and be dependent.” That was the woman Lee married in 1973. What he could not have known was that the same industry he was about to help her enter would change her so completely that the woman who eventually walked out was someone he barely recognized — and that he himself had opened every door.
Advertisements
But first, 1973 brought something else entirely. The role that would make him a global phenomenon. Colonel Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man — a former astronaut rebuilt after a near-fatal accident with bionic implants that gave him superhuman strength, speed, and vision. The show was broadcast in over seventy countries.
His face appeared on action figures, lunchboxes, and posters across America. Children ran in slow motion imitating him on playgrounds. He was, for five years, one of the most famous men on earth. What the show did that most of its contemporaries did not was make its hero genuinely conflicted. Steve Austin was not simply powerful — he was a man who had been rebuilt without being asked, who lived with the weight of what had been done to him, who carried his extraordinary capabilities as something closer to a burden than a gift. Lee brought a quietness to that conflict that the role required and that he was uniquely suited to provide. The companion series, The Bionic Woman, launched in 1976 and ran parallel to The Six Million Dollar Man until both were cancelled
in 1978. Lindsay Wagner played Jaime Sommers, Austin’s love interest who received her own bionic enhancements after a near-fatal skydiving accident. The two shows shared characters, crossover episodes, and a chemistry between their leads that was entirely professional and entirely effective.
Wagner later said that Lee was one of the most generous performers she worked with — always more interested in making the scene work than in making himself look good within it. In this period, He used his established position in the industry to secure Farrah a guest role on Owen Marshall, his own series, giving her a visible credit at a time when she had almost none. He was, by every account, genuinely and completely supportive of her ambitions.
He pushed her toward opportunities. He opened doors. And in 1976, when Charlie’s Angels cast her as Jill Munroe, he was enthusiastic about the opportunity even as it became clear that the show was going to do something extraordinary to her public profile. What he could not have fully anticipated was the scale.
Charlie’s Angels was not merely a hit — it was a cultural event, and Farrah was not merely popular within it. She became the face of an era. The poster that followed — Farrah in a red one-piece swimsuit, hair windswept, smile incandescent — sold twelve million copies and became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. What very few people know, and what Lee has mentioned with a mixture of pride and something harder to name, is that he was the one who chose that photograph. “I picked out the poster,” he told People magazine.
“The famous one. I picked out the picture.” But The fame changed the architecture of their marriage in ways that neither of them was prepared for. Their schedules stopped aligning. He was working fourteen-hour days on one set, she was working fourteen-hour days on another, and the days added up into weeks and then into months.
“There was a year or so when I think I saw her two weeks in one year,” Lee told People in his eighties. Two weeks in a year. That is not a marriage. That is two people sharing a mailing address. He encouraged her to leave Charlie’s Angels after one season to pursue feature films. He believed in her talent and wanted the industry to take her seriously as an actress, not just as a face on a poster.
The decision cost her a seven-million-dollar lawsuit from the producers for breach of contract. The films that followed — Somebody Killed Her Husband, Sunburn — were both critical and commercial disappointments despite her salary of $750,000 per picture. Lee had opened the door and she had walked through it and the room on the other side was not what either of them had imagined.
“There are times when I think that perhaps I created a monster,” he said, in one of his more honest moments. “But then, deep down, I know that’s just not true.” By 1979 the separation was effectively inevitable. What was not inevitable — what transformed a painful but manageable ending into something that left a mark Lee has carried ever since — happened in Toronto.
He was there in the autumn of 1979 filming The Last Chase. He ran into Ryan O’Neal — an old friend from the sixties, when Ryan was in Peyton Place and Lee was in The Big Valley. Two young actors who had caroused together in their bachelor days, reconnecting now after years apart. The friendship picked up easily.
By the time Ryan needed to go back to Los Angeles, Lee felt the bond had been restored. And then he made the request that he has had to live with ever since. “She’s all alone up there,” he told Ryan, according to Ryan’s own memoir. “Why don’t you take her to dinner one night?” Ryan held back at first. He knew what he was feeling and he knew it was wrong. He waited a week without calling.
Then a concert came up — an artist Farrah liked — and he had his excuse. The rest of the story moved the way these stories always do, with a momentum that neither person seemed able or willing to stop. Lee found out the way he found out about most things concerning his own marriage in that period — from the outside. When the reality became impossible to ignore, he called Ryan directly.
He asked him to back off. Ryan’s answer was simple and final. “I can’t. I really love her.” When People ran a piece on the whole affair in 1980, Lee said one thing that he has rarely matched for honesty before or since. “I may joke and tease around a lot, but the bottom line is I’m lonely and miserable without her.” Not performing vulnerability. Just telling the truth.
The divorce was finalized on February 16, 1982. Lee Majors walked out of it without drama, without a memoir, without a single public statement designed to position himself as the wronged party. He went to work. In 1981, even before the divorce was final, he had started production on The Fall Guy.
He played Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, and he brought to the role the same physical ease and unpretentious charm that had made Steve Austin work a decade earlier. He also sang the theme song himself — “The Unknown Stuntman,” a deliberately self-deprecating number that became one of the most recognized television themes of the decade.
The lyrics acknowledged his own situation with a dry humor that was entirely characteristic: a working actor navigating fame with his tongue slightly in his cheek. The show ran for five seasons. He produced it. He invited back co-stars from his earlier work — Linda Evans from The Big Valley, Lindsay Wagner from The Bionic Woman, Richard Anderson from The Six Million Dollar Man — people he had built something with and wanted to bring along rather than leave behind. It was the act of a man who understood loyalty as a practice rather than a sentiment.
The Fall Guy demonstrated something important: Lee Majors was not simply a man who had been famous. He was a man who knew how to sustain a career. Three separate hit series spanning three consecutive decades — The Big Valley in the sixties, The Six Million Dollar Man in the seventies, The Fall Guy in the eighties. Almost nobody in American television has managed that.
In 1988, six years after the divorce from Farrah, he married Karen Velez, a former Playboy Playmate. They had three children together — a daughter, Nikki, and twin boys, Dane and Trey. The marriage lasted until 1994, ending in what their spokesperson described as an “amicable” divorce, which in Hollywood tends to mean it was painful enough that both parties agreed not to elaborate.
Lee moved through the quieter years of his fifties taking smaller roles, living more privately, relocating to Florida for what amounted to a decade-long retreat from the center of things. He was not hiding. He was resting. There is a difference. He returned to the screen consistently in the 2000s.
In 2002, at the age of sixty-two, he married Faith Cross, a model, actress and writer who was thirty years younger. The age gap attracted exactly the predictable commentary. The marriage answered it by lasting — more than twenty years now, the longest and most settled of his four. They live in Houston, Texas, away from the machinery of Hollywood.
In 2003 he underwent heart surgery for a blocked artery and recovered with the same matter-of-fact determination he had brought to every other obstacle his life had placed in front of him. In 2019, asked about his marriage to Faith, he told People: “It is a record in Hollywood.” He said it with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had finally gotten something right and was not going to make a production of it.
In 2024 he appeared in a cameo in the feature film adaptation of The Fall Guy — acknowledging his own legacy without begging for it, present without being needy, which is exactly the posture he has maintained throughout his entire public life. In June 2009, with Farrah in the final weeks of her life, Lee picked up the phone and called her on her sixty-second birthday.
They talked for forty minutes. Her life. The cancer. Everything the years had carried between them without ever quite delivering. It was reported later by someone close to him — quietly, without fanfare — because that is the only register Lee Majors operates in when the things that matter most are at stake. Farrah Fawcett died on June 25, 2009. She was sixty-two years old.
Ryan O’Neal wrote in his 2012 memoir that her last words to him were “I love you.” Lee released a statement. “She fought a tremendous battle against a terrible disease. She was an angel on earth and now she is an angel forever.” Brief. Respectful. Calibrated with the precision of a man who understood exactly how much to say and exactly where to stop.
When her will was made public it contained one detail that nobody had anticipated. Farrah Fawcett left $100,000 to Lee Majors. Ryan O’Neal — the man who had been her partner for most of three decades, the man who had been at her bedside when she died, the man whose name appeared in her last words — received nothing from her estate.
There is a whole conversation buried inside that detail. Nobody who was involved has chosen to have it publicly. It sits there, quiet and complete, like most of the truest things in Lee Majors’ life. At 87, Lee Majors is still alive, still married to Faith, still turning up at fan events where strangers hand him things to sign with the same enthusiasm they would have brought to the same task in 1975.
He talks about The Six Million Dollar Man with the warmth of someone who genuinely loved what that show meant to the people who watched it. He talks about The Fall Guy with the satisfaction of someone who made something good on purpose. He talks about Barbara Stanwyck with reverence. He talks about Farrah, when he talks about her at all, with the careful warmth of someone who has decided that dignity is more important than the complete accounting.
He has never attacked Ryan O’Neal. Never named him in anger. Never given an interview designed to position himself as the wronged party in a scandal the public rendered its verdict on decades ago. He just kept working, kept showing up, kept being the man that people who encountered him consistently described with a single word. Gentleman.
Not the managed warmth of someone running an image. The real thing — the kind that comes from knowing what it costs to lose something and choosing not to make that loss into a weapon. He was orphaned at eighteen months. He found out from old newspapers in an attic. He beat four hundred men for a role on a Western. He ran slow motion across American television for five years.
He chose the photograph that became the most famous poster of a generation, and the woman in it left him for his friend. He called her forty minutes before she stopped being reachable. She left him $100,000 in her will. That is the story Lee Majors has been living quietly, without explanation, for eighty-seven years.
The woman he could never forget left evidence in her final document that she never forgot him either. Some things do not need to be said out loud to be completely, permanently true. If this story moved you, don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on those notifications. Leave us a comment below — what is your favorite Lee Majors role, or what do you remember most about Farrah Fawcett? We would love to hear from you. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you in the next one.
