Raquel Welch, a global reach in the 1960s and 1970s, died at the age of 82 in Los Angeles, her representative Steve Sauer said in a statement.
Born in September 1940 in Chicago under the name of Jo Raquel Tejada, the daughter of an American mother and a Bolivian father, she rose to popularity for her dazzling and hypnotic beauty and barely debuted on celluloid, through the film that featured her « One Million Years BC» (by Before Christ), released in 1965, in which she played a prehistoric woman and wore a tiny bi--ni, even smaller for the time, which took the breath away of several generations.
A year before that event, she had debuted in minor roles in television series and had played a schoolgirl (without credits within the cast) in the Elvis Presley film "Carousel of Love."
But the impact generated by the beauty and charisma of the actress in "One Million Years BC" would open the doors of Hollywood for a career that, in the long run, spanned five decades between film and television and exceeded 70 titles.
Before Hollywood her beauty, although less popular, did not go unnoticed, at the age of 14 she was crowned "Miss Photography" in a contest, inaugurating a long career of beauty awards that she crowned with a "Miss California".
After a brief marriage to James Welch, whom she met in high school, with whom she had two children before she was 20, and from whom she would take over the last name that would make her famous, leaving behind another of Latin origin that did not favor her in Hollywood. , the actress moved to Dallas where she worked as a bartender and poster model.
At the age of 23, she returned to Los Angeles, she signed up for an advertising agency and her career began, first in television series and then in the movies.
After the impact of "A million years..." a year later came "Fantastic Voyage", another blockbuster, in this case, directed by Richard Fleischer, in which he played a scientist's assistant in a science film fiction.
In 1973, she received the Golden Globe for Best Actress awarded by critics of the foreign Hollywood press for her work in "The Three Musketeers", a film by Richard Lester, where she shared the bill with Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Micahel York, Geraldine Chaplin, and Christopher Lee.
She was also one of the protagonists of "Wild Party", by the elegant British director James Ivory, about a figure of silent cinema in decline before the appearance of talkies, and in "The Prince and the Pauper", again in a film by adventures and repeating duo with Reed and with Lester as director.
In 1979 he returned to television to take part in two chapters of the funny "Mork and Mindy", starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber, and he starred in different telefilms for the following two decades, as well as participating in famous series such as "Sabrina" and " Seinfeld”, among others; being her last appearance in "Date my Dad", a 10-episode series from 2017, about a young widower whom her three daughters are looking for a consort and where Welch plays his mother-in-law.
Raquel Welch was married four times, to publicist James Welch, between 1959 and 1964; to filmmaker and producer Patrick Curtis from 1967 to 1972; to producer André Weinfeld from 1980-90; and to the British musician Richard Palmer (Supertramp) from 1999-2003. She had two sons from her first marriage: Damon Welch, and actress Tahnee Welch.
