Jaclyn Smith Marks 50 Years of Charlie's Angels With Memoir

Charlie's Angels ran for only five years, yet Jaclyn Smith is still talking about it half a century later. "We never thought we'd be talking about it 50 years later," Smith, now 80, told the Guardian in an interview published on 6 October 2026.

Smith is the only original Angel to stay with the show through its entire run, alongside Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson. She has now written a memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Called Charlie — and she is not, one gathers, the type of actor to distance herself from her defining project.

What does the memoir cover?

The book, and Smith's conversation over Zoom, present an actor who comes across as sensible, hardworking and optimistic. Her luck ran wide: loving and supportive parents, agents who appeared from nowhere with offers, an early hit show and a gift for making friends and recovering from heartbreak.

Even her breast cancer diagnosis, more than 20 years ago, was caught early and successfully treated.

Smith's positive outlook also shapes how she handles darker material. Drug use on the set of US television in the 1970s and 80s receives only a brief mention; her three ex-husbands get off fairly lightly; and her OCD, along with the men who stalked her at the height of her fame, are not dwelled upon.

How does she remember the show?

The Guardian's headline quote captures the mood of the era she recalls: "We got that bad guy and took him down!" The interview addresses the love she found on set, the harassment she endured off it, and the drug-taking she did her best to ignore.

For a series often reduced to its bikini-clad, big-hair-flicking image, the endurance of Charlie's Angels is the story's central fact. Five seasons produced a cultural footprint that a 50-year anniversary and a star's memoir now confirm.

Smith's book suggests that the last Angel standing intends to own that legacy rather than apologise for it — and that the conversation around the show, five decades on, is far from finished.