- US actress Raquel Welch is dead.
- Welch was particularly successful in cinemas in the 1960s and 1970s. She was 82 years old.
- The American died of a “short illness”, says her management.
Welch, born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago in 1940, celebrated her breakthrough in 1966 in the Stone Age hit “A Million Years Before Time”. As cave girl Loana, the then 26-year-old became a “sex symbol” overnight.
Long career in Hollywood
Life magazine declared her the most photographed woman of the year. The performance hung after her into old age. But Welch made the best of it. “I’m often asked if I’m tired of talking about this bikini, but to be honest, no,” she told The Sunday Post newspaper in 2018. “It was a big event in my life, so why not talk about it?” Welch said she received the bikini photo as fan mail almost every day, asking for an autograph.
She shot with Hollywood greats such as James Stewart («Bandolero»), Frank Sinatra («Lady in Cement»), John Huston («Myra Breckinridge») and Burt Reynolds («Death Comes Softly»). She proved her comedic talent in the strip “The Three Musketeers” (1973), for which she received the Golden Globe for best comedy actress. The actress continued into old age. In the 2017 comedy How to Be a Latin Lover, Welch played a widowed millionaire who is being ensnared by younger men.
The daughter of an American mother and a Bolivian father kept her first husband’s surname even though the relationship quickly fell apart. At the time of the divorce she was only 24 years old and the mother of two small children. Three more marriages followed. In 1999 she gave the last yes-word to a much younger restaurateur, and this marriage also broke up after a few years.