Busy Farrell Can Finally Rest in Peace

Particularly during the 1960s and ’70s, actress Sharon Farrell—who was recently reported to have died of natural causes on May 15, aged 82—seemed ubiquitous on American television programs.

Farrell was among the stars of Saints and Sinners, a pretty much forgotten, 1962-1963 NBC drama set amid the New York City newspaper business. She also had a recurring role on the original Hawaii Five-O, playing police detective Lori Wilson, and from 1991 to 1997 featured regularly as Florence Webster on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. Scanning her credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows her to have guested on everything from Naked City, My Favorite Martian, and Burke’s Law to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, Police Story, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The New Perry Mason, McCloud, Petrocelli, Banyon, and Mrs. Columbo. She later executed distinctive turns on T.J. Hooker and Matlock.

I remember the fetching blonde Farrell best, however, for a few other TV appearances. She occupied two very different roles in The Name of the Game, portraying a swindled blues musician in 1969’s “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and subsequently Sandrelle, a prospective love interest for the time-displaced Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) in the now-famous 1971 episode “L.A. 2017.” In the 1974 NBC pilot movie The Underground Man, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name and starring Peter Graves, Farrell brought emotion aplenty to her part as the mother of a troubled young woman (Kay Lenz) involved in a child kidnapping. And in “For the Love of Money,” the January 16, 1975, installment of David Janssen’s private-eye series, Harry O, she played the bikini-clad, merry-making girlfriend of a prominent booking agent. No matter what character Farrell inhabited, be it a spunky young roommate on Love, American Style or a machine-gun-toting militant on Police Woman, she delivered nothing short of a captivating performance.

Of course, Farrell didn’t confine herself to small-screen jobs. Her cinematic debut came in 1959’s Kiss Her Goodbye, adapted from the same-named, 1956 couple-on-the-run novel by Wade Miller. In its obituary, Deadline contended that Farrell “is best remembered for the [1974] film It’s Alive, in which she played the mother of a murderous deformed infant.” But she was seen as well in 1969’s The Reivers, 1980’s The Stunt Man, and 1987’s Can’t Buy Me Love. The big-screener that brought her to my early attention was Marlowe (1969), starring James Garner as Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe. In that Hollywood take on Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel, The Little Sister, Farrell personated Orfamay Quest, a charmingly naïve but worried girl from Kansas who employs Marlowe to find her missing brother, and lends the picture both humor and a modicum of treachery.

(Above) Sharon Farrell starred with James Garner in Marlowe.

Sharon Farrell was born Sharon Lee Forsmoe in Sioux City, Iowa, on December 24, 1940. Her ancestry was Norwegian, and she was reared in a Lutheran family. As a child, she began studying ballet and went on to tour with the American Ballet Theatre Company, which took her to New York City. She was just 18 years old when she made Kiss Her Goodbye, but had already caught the acting bug. As Wikipedia recalls, Farrell bore a son, Chance Boyer, in 1970 with fellow performer John F. Boyer. Afterward, she “suffered an embolism which caused her heart to stop beating for four minutes. She ended up with serious brain damage that resulted in memory loss and physical impairments. With the help of colleagues, Farrell worked to regain her abilities, including her memory, and resumed her acting career, yet she kept her illness a secret under the advice of friend and actor Steve McQueen, who warned her that if word of her illness got out, her career would be over. Keeping her illness hidden, Farrell worked steadily for decades.” By the way, McQueen was another of the men, in addition to Boyer, with whom she was romantically linked over the years. The Hollywood Reporter’s obit of Farrell says that at one point, she was “involved in ‘a love triangle’” with both McQueen (her co-star in The Reivers) and martial arts legend Bruce Lee (who made quite a showing in Marlowe) “that resulted in Lee and McQueen not doing a movie together.”

IMDb lists Farrell’s final television gig as a January 1999 episode of the U.S. Navy legal drama JAG. More than another decade passed before she accepted (in her early 70s) the part of a grandmother in two episodes of the digital drama Broken at Love. Yet there’s little fear of Sharon Farrell being forgotten, as long her vast wealth of Hollywood work continues to bring her broad-smiling, twinkle-eyed face into homes and theaters around the world.

READ MORE: “Sharon Farrell Passes On,” by Terence Towles Canote
(A Shroud of Thoughts).

WATCH THEM NOW: At least for the time being, 1974’s The Underground Man, the Name of the Game episode “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and the Harry O installment “For the Love of Money”—all featuring Farrell—can all be enjoyed online.