A Golden Globe winner, the star has acted in more than 30 films and 50 television series during a career spanning five decades.
Legendary Hollywood actress Raquel Welch has passed away. The American actress, Raquel Welch was once considered the most beautiful woman in the world after wearing a leather bikini in One million years BCpassed away this Wednesday at the age of 82, his agent reported.
The Bolivian-ancestry star died “quietly this morning after a brief illness,” his agent wrote in a statement sent to AFP, without giving further details.
Welch rose to fame in the 1960s for his role in One million years BCthe prehistoric adventure whose poster presented her to the world in a tiny bikini that made her one of the biggest sex symbols of her time.
A Golden Globe winner, the star has acted in more than 30 films and 50 television series during a career spanning five decades, including fantastic trip y Three Musketeers.
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Raquel Welch
Jo-Raquel Tejada, born in Chicago on September 5, 1940, the daughter of a Bolivian aeronautical engineer and an American, grew up in California where she studied classical dance.
At age 14, she was crowned Miss Photogenic in a pageant, the first in a long series of beauty awards that included Miss California.
After a brief marriage to James Welch, whom she met in high school and with whom she had two children before she was 20, she moved to Dallas where she worked as a waitress and modeled for posters.
In 1963 she returned to Los Angeles, where she met publicity agent Patrick Curtis, who convinced her to keep the last name Welch to hide her Latin origins.
He began his career with a few supporting roles on the big screen, including Rustabaoutstarring King Elvis Presley.
And she made the leap to be selected by 20th Century Fox in 1966 to star in fantastic trip, directed by Richard Fleischer. Next would come her role that immortalized her in the leather bikini that would mark her career.
«People saw me as a sex symbol. But in reality I was a single mother with two small children! », she exclaimed half a century later in her autobiography Beyond the cleavage (Beyond the neckline).
«Can you imagine me in the poster with a child in my arms and the other in his stroller? It breaks the myth a bit, right?
EO// With information from: The National
