Hollywood actress Raquel Welch passes away aged 82
American actress Raquel Welch, whose emergence from the sea in a bikini in the film One Million Years BC would propel her to international sex symbol status throughout the 1960s and '70s, has passed away. She was 82. Raquel passed away early Wednesday after a brief illness, according to her agent, Stephen LaManna .
Raquel’s breakthrough came in 1966's campy prehistoric flick One Million Years BC, despite having a 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. 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 said in an interview in 1981.
Her beauty captured pop culture's attention, with Playboy crowning her the ‘most desired woman’ of the '70s. 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 Raquel covers an escape tunnel — the last of three that character Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) used after Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.
Admirers took to Twitter to mourn the star, including TV host Rosie O’Donnell, actor Chris Meloni and writer-director Paul Feig, who worked with Raquel on Sabrina the Teenage Witch and called her “Kind, funny and a true superstar whom I was pretty much in love with for most of my childhood. We’ve lost a true icon.”
In addition to acting, Raquel was a singer and dancer. She surprised many critics — and won positive reviews — when she starred in the 1981 musical Woman of the Year on Broadway, replacing a vacationing Lauren Bacall.
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 media sources in 1993, “They'll say, 'Raquel Welch wants to direct? Give me a break.”’
Raquel was born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago and raised in La Jolla, California. (The Jo in her name was from her mother, Josephine). Raquel was a divorced mother when she met ex-actor turned press agent, Patrick Curtis. Patrick became her manager and second husband and helped shape her into a glamour girl with hundreds of magazine covers and a string of movies, plus exercise videos and books like The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program.
Though she would appear in exploitative films, she also surprised many in the industry with fine performances, including in Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers, which earned her a Golden Globe, and opposite James Coco in Wild Party. She was also nominated for a Globe in 1988 for the TV movie Right to Die. She played herself and mocked divas in an episode of Seinfeld, memorably attacking Elaine and rattling Kramer.
Married and divorced four times, she is survived by two children, Damon Welch and Tahnee Welch, who also became an actress, including landing a featured role in 1985’s Cocoon.