Raquel Welch, Actress and ’60s Sex Symbol, Is Dead at 82

NYT MOVIES: Raquel Welch, Actress and ’60s Sex Symbol, Is Dead at 82
By Anita Gates
Section: Movies
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 15, 2023 at 02:00AM

Beginning with a doeskin bikini in “One Million Years B.C.,” she built a celebrated show business career around sex appeal and, sometimes, a comic touch.

Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image for a half-century in show business, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Her death was confirmed by her son, Damon Welch. No cause was given.
Ms. Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight by the throat with her defiant, alert-to-everything, take-no-prisoners stance and her dancer’s body. She was 26. It had been four years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.
Camille Paglia, the feminist critic, described the poster photograph as “the indelible image of a woman as queen of nature.” Ms. Welch, she went on, was “a lioness — fierce, passionate and dangerously physical.”

When Playboy in 1998 named the 100 sexiest female stars of the 20th century, Ms. Welch came in third — right after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Brigitte Bardot was fourth.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/15/movies/raquel-welch-dead.html