Tammy Faye Messner

Tamara Faye LaValley was born March 7, 1942, in International Falls, Minnesota. She met Jim Bakker at North Central University in Minneapolis; they married in 1961 and became itinerant Pentecostal evangelists together before joining Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, where Tammy Faye helped originate a children's puppet program before the couple moved into adult programming.

From 1974 to 1987, Tammy Faye co-founded and co-hosted the PTL Club alongside Jim Bakker, appearing daily as a singer, interviewer and emotional counterpoint to her husband's salesmanship. Her heavy television makeup, her tears on camera and her unguarded manner became as recognizable to American audiences as any single sermon PTL broadcast, and made her, alongside her husband, one of the most caricatured figures in American religious broadcasting.

The image obscured a role that was substantively her own: PTL's music, its guest bookings and much of its emotional register were Tammy Faye's design as much as Jim's, and she remained, after the scandal that ended the ministry, the figure most associated with its public identity in the decades that followed.

She was ordained alongside her husband within the couple's independent Pentecostal ministry rather than through any single denominational body, and biographers have generally credited her, more than Jim, with whatever warmth viewers took away from a program built primarily around her husband's fundraising appeals.

Tammy Faye divorced Jim Bakker in 1992 while he was serving his federal sentence, and married building contractor Roe Messner, who had built much of Heritage USA, in 1993. Messner was himself later convicted of bankruptcy fraud in 1995 and served about two years in prison, an echo of the financial troubles that had ended the marriage he replaced.

Tammy Faye rebuilt a public career on her own terms after PTL, appearing in concerts, a short lived secular television talk show, and eventually a series of interviews and appearances that introduced her, for the first time, to an audience well outside evangelical broadcasting. Her consistent public message of acceptance, delivered without qualification to interviewers who asked her directly about gay viewers, won her an improbable following as a gay icon in her later years, a reputation many of PTL's original viewers did not share and one she never disavowed.

Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996, she spoke about the disease publicly for more than a decade, including in a 2004 documentary, Tammy Faye: Death Defying, made after the cancer had spread to her lungs. She continued public appearances and interviews until weeks before her death, telling audiences in her final months that doctors had stopped treating the disease. She died in Loch Lloyd, Missouri, on July 20, 2007, at age 65.