In the seventies he was the most expensive man on television - at least according to the show's title. Lee Majors played Colonel Steve Austin in "The Six Million Dollar Man", an astronaut who after a crash is rebuilt with bionic parts and sent back to work stronger than ever. The series made him an icon, and he carried on his career as stuntman Colt Seavers in the eighties action series The Fall Guy and in a string of films.

More than five decades later, the bionic man is ageing like everyone else. The difference is how he talks about it. When he turned 86 last year, he posted a message that reads more like an attitude than a birthday note: "Another trip around the Sun... and although the calendar says 86, I prefer to think of it as 68 with a few extra chapters. Grateful for life, for love and for all the blessings." Fans wrote in the comments that at 86 he's as handsome as ever.

In an industry that sells eternal youth with a scalpel and a filter, this is almost subversive. Majors doesn't claim that the years don't count. He just refuses to let the years write his script. The man whose character was invented to be repaired by technology chooses the oldest technique of all in real life - humour.

His private life was anything but bionic. He married four times: to Kathy Robinson in 1961, with whom he had his son Lee Majors Jr., then to Farrah Fawcett of "Charlie's Angels" from 1973 to 1982, to Karen Velez from 1988 to 1994, and to Faith Noelle Cross in 2002. His marriage to Fawcett was under constant media pressure. "That's how it all started. It was very fast and it lasted almost 12 years," he said later. "There was one year where I think I saw her for two weeks in total." Of the paparazzi, he said they weren't easy to avoid, but that it "wasn't as complicated as it is today".

Fawcett died in June 2009, aged 62. Majors, meanwhile, made a cameo in the 2024 film version of The Fall Guy - a symbolic passing of the baton to a new generation that retold the same story for a new era. Will any of them still be in the audience's memory five decades from now, the way he is?