Raquel Welch worked alongside some of the biggest figures of her time, but as time went by her opportunities were reduced to only occasional TV appearances. One of them was a memorable episode of Seinfeld.
One of the greatest references to Hollywood in the 60s passed away. American actress Raquel Welch died at the age of 82 at her home in Los Angeles, her circle confirmed to the magazine. Although details were not specified, it was noted that her death occurred after a brief battle with illness.
The star was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago in 1940. The daughter of an aeronautical engineer from Bolivia, Armando Carlos Tejada, and the American Josephine Sarah Hall, the interpreter won beauty pageants before studying theater in San Diego and dropping out of college. At age 19. She married and had two children with a classmate, but by the early 1960s, she was separated and looking for job opportunities in Los Angeles.
One of her first jobs was a small role in the musical Roustabout (1964), starring Elvis Presley. Not long after, she landed a lucrative contract with 20th Century Fox, which gave her a central role in the sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage (1966). That tape would take her to film in England One million years B.C. (1966), the production that would define both her career and a memorable episode in the industry.
Dressed only in a bikini, the actress posed as a Pleistocene woman ready to take on whoever came her way. Her poster transcended her time (she was hanging in the cell of the protagonist of Dreams of Liberty) and immediately catapulted her to stardom. In keeping with that status, in 1968 she shared the screen with Frank Sinatra (Lady in Cement), and the offers piled up.
However, she was not content with the sex symbol label that the media endorsed her. In 1970 she starred in Myra Breckinridge (1970), an adaptation of Gore Vidal's novel of the same name about a trans woman who undergoes a sex reassignment operation. The film was the focus of multiple controversies (it received an "X" rating, suitable for adults only) and was neither commercially nor critically successful, but it underscored Welch's willingness to resist being pigeonholed.
One of her best performances was given in The Three Musketeers (1973), an adaptation of Dumas's book with Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain in the main roles. Constance Bonacieux's impeccable incarnation of her netted him the first and only Golden Globe of her career. When her name was famous worldwide, she filmed in France the movie Animal (1977), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and shared the bill with Bill Cosby and Harvey Keitel in the comedy Mother, jugs & Speed (1976).
She, but was not restricted to her work on the screen. In 1973 she staged her own song-and-dance show in Las Vegas and eight years later she shined as Lauren Bacall in the musical Woman of the Year, the final confirmation that she was a multi-talented woman.
A bitter dispute would mark her career in the 1980s. MGM fired her from the film Cannery Row (1982) when she had barely been filming for two weeks, assuring that she was not complying with the previously stipulated rehearsal hours. She alleged a breach of contract and the matter was resolved in the judicial arena. The courts accredited that the action had been a maneuver by the study to cover delays and budget problems, for which she won that cock.
Despite her triumph, her career would never be the same again. Since then, she has barely acted in a handful of films (Legally Blonde was one of them and the last one was How to be a Latin Lover, together with Eugenio Derbez) and she turned to series above all. On television, she made almost only occasional appearances, although one of them was particularly notable: part of the eighth season of Seinfeld, the actress gave life to a temperamental version of herself in a chapter called The Summer of George.
It was another proof of her ductility to those who only appreciated her as a sexual icon, a nickname she tried to dispute in her later years, especially when she released her autobiography, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, in 2010. ). "Personally, I always hated feeling so exposed and vulnerable," she launched into those pages.
