Raquel Welch, star of the 1960s and 1970s, consecrated as the most beautiful woman in the world for her role as a cave dweller in an animal skin bikini in One Million Years B.C., will however never have had any great roles. The actress died on Wednesday, February 15 at the age of 82 after a brief illness, her manager said in a statement sent to AFP. During her career, she appeared in over thirty films, including The Three Musketeers. Her performance in this 1973 film won her a Golden Globe.
Born Jo Raquel Tejada, this American of Bolivian origin first made a name for herself as a beauty queen by winning several modeling competitions, before conquering Hollywood. After the disappearance of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, the young woman with the auburn mane resumed in 1966 the status of universal sex symbol sweeping away the idea that only a blonde could embody the quintessence of femininity.
She got her start in mediocre movies, the most notable of them being Roustabout, where she appeared alongside Elvis Presley. After twenty extra roles, she was spotted by 20th Century Fox who chose her in 1966 as the headliner for Richard Fleischer's Fantastic Voyage. The science fiction film makes her take off. That same year, she played a prehistoric savage in One Million Years B.C., a poor, almost silent film whose only poster marked the history of cinema. “People saw me as a sex symbol, but in reality I was a single mother with two young children!" she exclaimed half a century later in her autobiography, Beyond the Cleavage.
She went on to film in the 1970s, but remained confined to her status as a beauty in all the genres in which she ventured. Westerns (Bandolero, Hannie Caulder), detective films (Lady in Cement) and comedies (Animal by Claude Zidi with Jean-Paul Belmondo). The actress has also starred in more than fifty series.