Unforgettable’s Cheryl Ladd: I didn’t want to join Charlie’s Angels

It’s been almost 36 years since we last saw Cheryl Ladd straining against a skimpy bikini with her Colgate smile and perfectly coiffed blonde hair, battling villains as one of TV’s iconic crime-fighting heroines Charlie’s Angels. The series was dismissed as “jiggle TV” yet its popularity spawned hit movies, a remake and a lifetime in worldwide syndication.

Now two of the surviving Angels – Cheryl Ladd and Jaclyn Smith – are planning a TV reunion, Ladd exclusively reveals to the Daily Express. “We’d love to do a comedy about a couple of older women so Jaclyn and I are trying to develop a fun project for us to star in and produce together,” says Ladd, who currently co-stars in movie thriller Unforgettable.

“We’re both still beautiful, talented women and have a lot to offer. We want to work together again.” But don’t expect to see original Angel Kate Jackson in their new show. “Kate’s complex – let’s leave it at that,” says Ladd diplo matically. Evidently Jackson never took to Ladd stepping into the hit show when Farrah Fawcett quit after the first season.

“I was the outsider,” says Ladd, who went on to co-star in four seasons. “But Jaclyn and I have remained close friends.” Ladd’s hopes of a TV revival were boosted by rave reviews for her performance in Unforgettable as the glacial, poisonously controlling mother of the equally disturbed Katherine Heigl, who battles Rosario Dawson over – what else? – a man.

“It was great fun to play someone so deliciously demented,” says Ladd. “In my travels I have met women who are cold as ice, who make the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and I was inspired by them.”

A loving parent to a grown daughter and stepdaughter, Ladd admits she wasn’t always a paragon of motherhood. “There’s no mother alive who thinks she couldn’t have done better raising her children and I’ve had my share of regrets.

“I missed out on a part of my daughter Jordan’s childhood. She was just two when I joined Charlie’s Angels and I was working 14-hour days. She’d be asleep when I kissed her goodbye early in the mornings and be asleep in bed by the time I got home to kiss her good-night. It was terrible, a big sacrifi ce.” Charlie’s Angels brought Ladd international fame and fortune yet amazingly she initially refused the role.

“I was reluctant to join Charlie’s Angels – who could replace Farrah Fawcett? I didn’t want to be seen as stepping into her shoes.” Aaron Spelling auditioned more than 100 actresses before returning to Ladd, begging her to reconsider. “I didn’t want to play Farrah’s character because everyone would just compare us all the time,” she explains. “I said I’d like to play a character who’s funny, tries hard but makes mistakes, someone who’s not perfect.

Aaron said it was a great idea and his genius was to make her Farrah’s little sister so I was already family.” But Ladd also learned to be careful what she wished for. “It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. At the height of Charlie’s Angels I was probably at my lowest point. 

“Being away from my daughter, with my marriage crumbling, all the pressures we were under to make the show great and living in a goldfish bowl, it was really tough. At that time women were being told we could be a ‘superwoman’ and ‘have it all’ but that was just a lie. You can’t have it all! Something has to give. “My marriage to my first husband David Ladd was falling apart.

We’d married young and I’d had my daughter at 23. But I was a smalltown girl from a loving family in South Dakota and David was the son of movie star Alan Ladd. We were just very different people. You can’t make someone happy if you’re not happy yourself. “Work was so intense that I was hardly seeing my daughter and I felt I had lost control of my life – it was controlling me. Even during our hiatus I was under pressure to make movies-of-the-week, do photoshoots, promotions and publicity.

I was overwhelmed and felt really lost. “I felt like I was losing sight of myself. Nobody tells you how to be famous, how it’ll change your life, being chased everywhere by paparazzi, having to enter restaurants through the kitchen. It’s hard.” Ladd credits her Christian faith with bringing her back from the brink.

“At the height of my success I was the least happy because I was the farthest from God. I feel my faith more deeply now. It’s essential to me.” At 65 Ladd still looks sensational with her blonde mane, peachesand-cream complexion and slender figure. Unlike so many in Hollywood who pretend they never use Botox or Restylane to smooth the years away, Ladd laughs: “I’m doing what everybody else is doing.” She even admits retouching selfies that she takes on her phone.

“I do whatever it takes to stay in shape. I watch what I eat, exercise, swim laps in the pool in the summer and Zumba dance. But I don’t obsess about it and I allow myself to have fun – a glass of wine in the afternoon, maybe two.

“When I became famous there was an element of my popularity that was determined by my looks and that’s something I try to maintain. But I’m not walking around in a bikini all day like in Charlie’s Angels. I’m 65!

Nobody wants to see me in a bikini any more… well maybe my husband but that’s about it.” S HE has been married for 35 years to Scots-born TV producer and novelist Brian Russell, meeting when he wrote her first Top 40 hit Think It Over, in 1978. “The secret to our marriage is that we both look at life out of the same window. We’re the best of friends on top of all the love we share.” They moved from California to small-town Boerne amid verdant rolling Texas Hill Country in 2014, building a home, and are now designing mansions for sale.

“To make other people’s dreams come true,” she says. “I love it here because I can go without make-up, put my hair in a ponytail, go grocery shopping and just be myself.” But she often returns to Hollywood, last year joining the acclaimed cast of Emmy-winning TV series The People vs OJ Simpson as the wife of lawyer Robert Shapiro, played by John Travolta. “I turn down a lot of scripts because they’re icky, or use foul language for shock effect.

Unforgettable leapt out at me, it’s such a great psychological thriller. I’m always looking for another great role and hope I can find it in my project with Jaclyn Smith. “I love acting. I’ve lived through so many highs and lows, have all my life experience and all the pain I’ve survived to bring to roles – but that’s only a part of who I am.” 

Unforgettable is in cinemas now