An actress overshadowed by her own beauty. Raquel Welch, she died this Wednesday at the age of 82 after she suffered "a brief illness" of which no further details were given, according to what her family reported to the American portal TMZ, specialized in celebrities.
Raquel Tejada (Chicago, 1940), of Bolivian origins, was more than just an erotic myth from the 1960s and 1970s. Since her teens she was admired for her physique and she won some beauty pageants, but her true aspirations were set in acting. Welch's work led her to have an extensive film career and she would be recognized internationally until her last days.
Her path in the film industry began at the hands of director John Rich with a small role playing the high school girl in the musical The Globetrotter (Roustabout, 1964) with Elvis Presley, Barbara Stanwyck as protagonists. Welch's appearances on the big screen did not go beyond small roles.
A short time later he got his big moment in the science fiction classic Fantastic Voyage (Fantastic Voyage, 1966), directed by Richard Fleischer. Who also directed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). In Fantastic Voyage, Welch and other scientists shrink down in size and travel inside the patient's body to perform an operation.
And in the same year, his career took off with the adventure of the fantastic genre and with a trail of romanticism in One Million Years B.C., 1966. The image of Welch turned into a caveman wearing a small beige bikini eclipsed the theaters of North America and strengthened its status as an erotic myth in a film whose promotional poster went down in the iconographic history of cinema and also marked the birth of the pinup girl. This beauty was taken advantage of by the Hollywood industry and her sexist charge would accompany her throughout her artistic career.
The actress would stand out as the protagonist in the controversial adaptation of Gore Vidal's novel, Myra Breckinridge (1970), in which she played a young transsexual. Provocative and controversial in its time, the film denounced American machismo.
It was not until some time later that he would participate again in a musical film, but this time as the protagonist. In the umpteenth version of the famous novel by Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (The Three Musketeers, 1974), her talent was recognized with the Golden Globe for Best Musical-Comedy Actress.
Raquel Welch, worked in an extensive film career in some 50 film projects along with another television list. Some of her latest works were the comedies Date My Dad (2017) and How to be a Latin lover (How to Be a Latin Lover, 2017), precisely on the small screen.
