Long before every actor had a perfume and a handbag line, a Houston-born woman put her name on a rack of clothes at Kmart. The rack stayed put for decades.
Jaclyn Smith was born in Houston on October 26, 1945. She's the Kelly Garrett of Charlie's Angels, the only original Angel who stayed for the show's whole run, and one of the first TV stars to build a real business on a retail floor. That's why Texas gets to claim her.
From Houston to New York
Smith attended Trinity University in San Antonio, then moved to New York City and worked in commercials and print ads. She became a "Breck girl" for Breck Shampoo, the kind of job that put a face in front of millions of living rooms before anyone knew the name. She later did spokesmodel work for Wella Balsam shampoo alongside Farrah Fawcett.
Plenty of people do that and never get the call. She got it, and she made the most of it, which turned out to be the pattern for the rest of her career.
The Angel who stayed
The pilot movie aired in March 1976, and Charlie's Angels ran from 1976 to 1981. Smith played Kelly Garrett for all five seasons. Nobody else among the original female leads can say that, and I'd argue the staying power matters as much as the hair ever did. Casts turn over. She didn't. When she looked back on the show years later, she told People it changed their lives.
She came back to the character for cameos in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle in 2003 and in the 2019 film.
The Angels weren't her only work. In 1981 she played the title role in the television film Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and earned a Golden Globe nomination for it. Later she took parts in TV movies and series, and she hosted the first two seasons of Bravo's Shear Genius. She also made a long run of TV movies. The Hollywood Walk of Fame gave her a star in 1989.
The Kmart deal
Here's the part I find most interesting. In 1985 Smith launched the Jaclyn Smith Collection for Kmart, in about 1,400 stores nationwide.
It was a bet that a woman in Ohio or Oklahoma would buy a blouse because she trusted the person on the label. It worked. The line marked 25 years at Kmart in 2010, and her clothing and lifestyle brand marked 40 years in 2025. Her Kmart contract expired in July 2021, and she has said she had a clothing line with Kmart for 36 years.
Plenty of Texans have made money from their fame. Fewer turned it into something that outlasted the show that made them famous. That's the quiet lesson of her career, and nobody had to teach it to her twice.
A birthday worth marking
Smith turns 81 on October 26, 2026. As of 2026 she's still tied to the brand she started in the mid 1980s.
Did you or someone in your family own something from the Jaclyn Smith Collection at Kmart? Tell us what it was in the comments, and tell us whether you were an Angels fan first or a Kmart shopper first.
Photo: m j c at https://www.flickr.com/photos/36166718@N00/, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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