Raquel Welch, whose emergence from the ocean in a skimpy, furry bikini within the movie One Million Years B.C. would propel her to worldwide intercourse image standing all through the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, has died. She was 82.
Welch died early Wednesday after a quick sickness, in line with her agent, Stephen LaManna of the expertise company Innovative Artists.
Welch’s breakthrough got here in 1966′s campy prehistoric flick One Million Years B.C., regardless of having a grand complete of three strains. Clad in a brown doeskin bikini, she efficiently evaded pterodactyls however not the discover of the general public.
Actress Raquel Welch attends the premiere of “How to Be a Latin Lover” at ArcLight Cinemas Cinerama Dome on April 26, 2017 in Hollywood, California.
Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic
“I just thought it was a goofy dinosaur epic we’d be able to sweep under the carpet one day,” she advised The Associated Press in 1981. “Wrong. It turned out that I was the Bo Derek of the season, the lady in the loin cloth about whom everyone said, ‘My God, what a bod’ and they expected to disappear overnight.”
She didn’t, taking part in Lust for the comedy staff of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of their movie Bedazzled in 1967 and taking part in a undercover agent within the horny spy spoof Fathom that very same yr.
Her curves and wonder captured popular culture consideration, with Playboy crowning her the “most desired woman” of the ’70s, regardless of by no means being fully bare within the journal. In 2013, she graced the No. 2 spot on Men’s Health’s “Hottest Women of All Time” listing. In the movie The Shawshank Redemption, a poster of Welch is used to cowl an escape tunnel, the final of three ladies he used photos of after Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.
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In addition to performing, Welch was a singer and dancer. She shocked many critics — and gained optimistic critiques — when she starred within the 1981 musical Woman of the Year on Broadway, changing a vacationing Lauren Bacall. She returned to the Great White Way in 1997 in Victor/Victoria.
She knew that some individuals didn’t take her significantly due to her glamourous picture. “I’m not Penny Marshall or Barbra Streisand,” she advised the AP in 1993. “They’ll say, ‘Raquel Welch wants to direct? Give me a break.’”
Welch was born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago and raised in La Jolla, California. (The Jo in her title was from her mom, Josephine). Welch was a divorced mom when she met ex-actor turned press agent, Patrick Curtis.
“The irony of it all is that even though people thought of me as a sex symbol, in reality I was a single mother of two small children!” she wrote in her autobiography, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.
Curtis grew to become her supervisor and second husband and helped form her right into a glamour-girl with a whole bunch of journal covers and a string of flicks, plus train movies and books like The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program.
Raquel Welch attends the 2014 Carousel of Hope Ball at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on October 11, 2014 in Beverly Hills, California.
Jason LaVeris / FilmMagic
Though she would seem in exploitative movies, she additionally shocked many within the trade with fantastic performances, together with in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, which earned her a Golden Globe, and opposite James Coco in Wild Party. She was additionally nominated for a Globe in 1988 for the TV film Right to Die.
Married and divorced 4 occasions, she is survived by two kids, Damon Welch and Tahnee Welch.
© 2023 The Canadian Press