Raquel Welch, actor, model and sex symbol, dies at 82 – National

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 Sixties and ’70s, has died. She was 82.

Welch died early Wednesday after a quick sickness, in keeping with her agent, Stephen LaManna of the expertise company Revolutionary Artists.

Welch’s breakthrough got here in 1966′s campy prehistoric flick One Million Years B.C., regardless of having a grand whole of three traces. Clad in a brown doeskin bikini, she efficiently evaded pterodactyls however not the discover of the general public.

“I simply thought it was a goofy dinosaur epic we’d be capable of sweep beneath the carpet sooner or later,” she informed The Related Press in 1981. “Mistaken. It turned out that I used to be the Bo Derek of the season, the girl within the loin fabric about whom everybody mentioned, ‘My God, what a bod’ they usually anticipated to vanish in a single day.”

She didn’t, taking part in Lust for the comedy workforce of Peter Cook dinner 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 lady” of the ’70s, regardless of by no means being fully bare within the journal. In 2013, she graced the No. 2 spot on Males’s Well being’s “Hottest Girls of All Time” record.

Spoiler warning: Within the movie The Shawshank Redemption, a poster of Welch is used to cowl an escape tunnel — the final of three giant posters fundamental character Andy Dufresne (performed by Tim Robbins) used to cowl the opening over the course of almost twenty years, after beforehand hanging photographs of Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.

Along with appearing, Welch was a singer and dancer. She shocked many critics — and gained constructive evaluations — when she starred within the 1981 musical Lady of the Yr on Broadway, changing a vacationing Lauren Bacall. She returned to the Nice White Approach in 1997 in Victor/Victoria.

She knew that some folks didn’t take her significantly due to her glamourous picture. “I’m not Penny Marshall or Barbra Streisand,” she informed the AP in 1993. “They’ll say, ‘Raquel Welch needs 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.

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“The irony of all of it is that although folks considered me as a intercourse image, in actuality I used to be a single mom of two young children!” she wrote in her autobiography, Raquel: Past the Cleavage.

Curtis turned her supervisor and second husband and helped form her right into a glamour-girl with a whole lot of journal covers and a string of flicks, plus train movies and books like The Raquel Welch Complete Magnificence and Health Program.

Although she would seem in exploitative movies, she additionally shocked many within the trade with high quality performances, together with in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, which earned her a Golden Globe, and opposite James Coco in Wild Get together. She was additionally nominated for a Globe in 1988 for the TV film Proper to Die.

Married and divorced 4 occasions, she is survived by two kids, Damon Welch and Tahnee Welch.

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