American actress Raquel Welch, star of the 60s and 70s who is widely remembered in Hollywood for her role as a cave naiad in an animal skin bikini in “A Million Years Before Jesus Christ”, died on Wednesday February 15 in the age of 82, announced his manager.
Rachel “passed away peacefully early this morning after a brief illness”, he explained in a press release sent to AFP, without further details. During her career, she had appeared in more than thirty films, including “Le Voyage Fantastique” and “Les Trois Mousquetaires”.
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Jo-Raquel Tejada, her real name, was born in Chicago on September 5, 1940 to a Bolivian aeronautical engineer and an American. She grew up in California where she learned classical dance. At 14, the young Latin American won the “Miss photogenic” prize, the first of a long series including “Miss forms”, “Miss beauty among beauties”, “Miss young lady from California”.
“They were only interested in the other woman”
After the disappearance of Marylin Monroe in 1962, she gradually resumed the status of universal sex symbol. But the actress seemed to suffer from this status conferred by Hollywood.
“I really had the feeling that people were totally laughing at me, they were only interested in the other woman: the one astride, in a rabbit skin bikini, with this impossible hourglass figure! They were all in love with this kind of super woman coming straight from the Amazon.she said.
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In the 1970s, Raquel Welch made films over the years in all genres: westerns (“Bandolero”, “A colt for three bastards”), detective films (“La femme en cement”) or even comedies (“L’animal” by Claude Zidi with Belmondo). In 1973, she won a Golden Globe for “The Three Musketeers”.
