Hollywood icon Raquel Welch dead at 82
LOS ANGELES — Raquel Welch had only three lines in the 1966 film “One Million Years B.C.,” but her doeskin bikini did all the talking anyway, launching her as an international icon almost over night.
Welch died Wednesday, according to her management company, Media Four. She was 82.
“Raquel Welch, the legendary bombshell actress of film, television and stage, passed away peacefully early this morning after a brief illness,” said a statement from Media Four. “Her career spanned over 50 years starring in over 30 films and 50 television series and appearances. The Golden Globe winner, in more recent years, was involved in a very successful line of wigs.”
Welch was a La Jolla beauty queen turned single mom, but to the world, she was an exotic actor whose smoldering looks and curvy figure suited the mood of the swinging 1960s.
“I liked that there was something very superhero about her,” Welch told the L.A. Times in 2016, referring to her role as Loana the cave girl. “At least I wasn’t one of those mincing little girls; I never wanted to be that.”
Indeed, Welch had a complicated relationship with her persona. As an actress, she was rarely taken as seriously as she took herself. And though she proudly refused to do nude scenes, her fame was always tied directly to her sexuality, a fate she accepted with regret.
“There was this perception of ‘Oh, she’s just a sexpot. She’s just a body. She probably can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.’” she told Men’s Health in 2012.
In an era when men often considered women largely ornamental, Welch earned a reputation for being strong-willed and independent. In 1970, at the peak of her fame, she took a role that no one wanted as a transsexual woman in the adaptation of Gore Vidal’s bestseller “Myra Breckinridge.”
Welch said she asked to be in the film because she was a fan of Vidal’s novel and thought it would offer a dramatic role that might take her career in a new direction.
But, she said, the final script was stripped of the book’s off-color humor and absurdity that she had so enjoyed. Welch ended up hating the finished project, as did audiences and critics. The film, perhaps, became best known for the fight she had on set with her co-star, Mae West, over who got to wear a black dress.
“I couldn’t control that the script wasn’t coming together,” Welch said in her defense. “Each rewrite got further and further from making any sense.”
A decade later, Welch sued MGM when the studio replaced her with a much younger, more affordable Debra Winger in the 1980 film version of John Steinbeck’s World War II-era novel “Cannery Row.”
Welch claimed the studio fired her because of her age and to save money, in the process ruining her career just as she was poised to win recognition as a serious actress. The studio said she was let go for showing up late and taking too long in makeup.
After a six-year legal battle, she won a $14 million settlement. But in the process, she earned — rightly or wrongly — a reputation for being difficult and her film career largely flickered out.
Welch blamed Hollywood’s reluctance to embrace older women for her diminished career.
“As life goes on you get more valuable as a person. Many women look better,” she told the L.A. Times in 2010. “Personally, I think I look better because I have lived and I have a different kind of aura about me having lived.”
Born Jo-Raquel Tejada on Sept. 5, 1940, in Chicago, Welch was the oldest of three children. Her father was a Bolivian-born aeronautical engineer who moved his family to San Diego when Welch was a toddler to design aircrafts during World War II.
He was a volatile man who bullied the household, especially her mother, a seamstress of English descent. Welch once threatened him with a fireplace poker to protect her mother.
A star student, Welch started winning beauty pageants when she was 14, ultimately earning the state title of Maid of California in 1958, the year she graduated from high school.