Raquel Welch, actor, model and sex symbol, dies at 82 – National | 24CA News
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 short sickness, in keeping 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 traces. Clad in a brown doeskin bikini, she efficiently evaded pterodactyls however not the discover of the general public.
“I just thought it was a goofy dinosaur epic we’d be able to sweep under the carpet one day,” she instructed 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, enjoying Lust for the comedy staff of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore of their movie Bedazzled in 1967 and enjoying a undercover agent within the attractive spy spoof Fathom that very same 12 months.
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 utterly bare within the journal. In 2013, she graced the No. 2 spot on Men’s Health’s “Hottest Women of All Time” checklist. In the movie The Shawshank Redemption, a poster of Welch is used to cowl an escape tunnel, the final of three ladies he used photographs of after Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.
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In addition to performing, Welch was a singer and dancer. She stunned many critics — and gained constructive opinions — 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 critically due to her glamourous picture. “I’m not Penny Marshall or Barbra Streisand,” she instructed 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 identify 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 turned her supervisor and second husband and helped form her right into a glamour-girl with tons of of journal covers and a string of films, plus train movies and books like The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program.
Though she would seem in exploitative movies, she additionally stunned many within the trade with superb 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