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.