Sexual icon of the decades of the sixties and seventies of the last century, the American actress Raquel Welch died this Wednesday at the age of 82 at her home in Los Angeles victim of a "brief illness" of which the family did not offer more details in statements to the North American portal TMZ, specialized in celebrities.
Remembered for films like A Million Years Ago (1966), where she appeared in an allegedly prehistoric fur bikini, her natural beauty always stood out in her roles, which inaugurated a new era in cinema with a more slender and athletic aesthetic than that of the women who had been considered sex symbols during the preceding decades, competing in this field with Marilyn Monroe herself in this transition.
That sexual charge that most of her film roles had made her one of the most coveted actresses in Hollywood and, in turn, earned her the nickname of the Body, which the actress herself never rejected, asserting herself as one of her qualities her ability to display a new eroticism, as she herself would explain in various interviews, claiming her role as a liberated woman and in charge of two children.
“People saw me as a sex symbol, but in reality I was a single mother with two young children! – She pointed out half a century after the role of his most remembered of her in his autobiography Beyond the neckline (Beyond the neckline) -. Can you imagine me on the poster with a child under my arm and the other in a stroller? That breaks the myth a bit, right?
The daughter of a Bolivian engineer who immigrated to the United States, she was born in Chicago in 1940 as Raquel Tejada, a surname she kept until she married James Welch, a high school classmate, at the age of 20. A marriage that barely lasted five years and to which four other weddings would be added, although her only two children were with her first husband.
Her path in the entertainment industry began at a very young age, since at just 14 years old she won the Miss Photogenic award, the first in a long series that included Miss Shapes, Miss Beauty among Beauties and Miss California Lady. Although her jump to the cinema came from the hand of Elvis Presley with a small role in The Globetrotter and later she obtained more prominent roles in films such as Fantastic Voyage (1966).
His great film career, however, took off with the prehistoric adventure of A Million Years Ago. The image of Welch and her iconic bikini cemented her status as an erotic icon for an entire generation in a film whose promotional poster (pictured) went down in movie history.
The actress was also part of the cast of films such as La mujer de cemento (1968), where she appeared alongside Frank Sinatra, and one of the most memorable films of her career: the western Hannie Caulder (1971) and the comedy Beautiful, intrepid and spy (1967). In 1973 she won a Golden Globe for The Three Musketeers.
After having ignored her Latin origins for much of her career, in her final stage as an actress she played Hispanic roles in Tortilla soup (2001) or Instructions to be a 'latin lover' (2017).
