Hollywood sex symbol Raquel Welch dies at 82
NEW YORK – Raquel Welch, whose emergence from the sea in a skimpy, furry bikini in the film “One Million Years B.C.” would propel her to international sex symbol status throughout the 1960s and ’70s, has died. She was 82.
Welch died early Wednesday after a brief illness, according to her agent, Stephen LaManna of talent agency Innovative Artists.
Welch’s breakthrough came in 1966’s campy prehistoric flick “One Million Years B.C.,” despite having a grand total of three lines. Clad in a brown doeskin bikini, she successfully evaded pterodactyls but not the notice of the public.
“I just thought it was a goofy dinosaur epic we’d be able to sweep under the carpet one day,” she told 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 did not, playing Lust for the comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in “Bedazzled” in 1967 and playing a secret agent in the sexy spy spoof “Fathom” that year.
Her curves and beauty captured pop culture attention, with Playboy crowning her the “most desired woman” of the 1970s. In 2013, she graced the No. 2 spot on Men’s Health’s “Hottest Women of All Time” list. In the film “The Shawshank Redemption,” a poster of Welch is used to cover an escape tunnel.
Welch also was a singer and dancer. She surprised critics and won positive reviews when she starred in the 1981 musical “Woman of the Year” on Broadway. She returned to the Great White Way in 1997 in “Victor/Victoria.”
She knew that some people didn’t take her seriously because of her glamorous image. “I’m not Penny Marshall or Barbra Streisand,” she told 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. Welch was a divorced mother when she met 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 “Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.”
Curtis became her manager and second husband and helped shape her into a glamour girl.
She also surprised many in the industry with fine performances, including in “The Three Musketeers,” which earned her a Golden Globe.