(Paris) Raquel Welch, Hollywood fantasy of the 60s and 70s, ordained the most beautiful woman in the world for her role as a cave naiad in a animal skin bikini in A Million Years before Jesus Christ, will never have had major roles.
Updated yesterday at 4:26pm.
Raphaëlle PICARD Agence France-Presse
The actress died on Wednesday morning at the age of 82 after a short illness, her manager said in a statement sent to AFP.
Following the disappearance of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, the auburn-maned young Amazon regained universal sex symbol status in 1966, sweeping away the notion that only a blonde could embody the quintessence of womanhood.
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Raquel Welch in 1967
But her fame was based on a misunderstanding: she was only asked to take off her clothes when Raquel Welch always wanted to prove that she had talent.
“I really felt like people were really laughing at me, they only cared about the other woman: that one astride that rabbit skin bikini with that impossible hourglass figure! They were all in love with this kind of superwoman who came straight out of the Amazon.
scraps
Jo-Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago on September 5, 1940 to a Bolivian aeronautical engineer father and an American mother. She grew up in California, where she studied classical dance. At 14, the young Latin American won the “Miss Photogenic” awards, the first in a long line, including “Miss Shapes”, “Miss Beauty among Beauties”, “Miss Young Lady of California”.
After a brief marriage to James Welch, with whom she had two children under the age of 20, she moved to Dallas and made a living from odd jobs as a waitress and model for racy posters. In search of fame, she returned to Los Angeles in 1963, where she met Patrick Curtis, an enterprising advertising agent.
He launches this young woman’s career with wacky lines and convinces her to keep the Welch name to hide her Latino origins, which weren’t very Hollywood palatable at the time. She starts out in mediocre films, the most notable of which is The Handyman, where she appears alongside Elvis Presley.
After twenty additional roles, she was discovered by 20th Century Fox, who chose her to headline Richard Fleicher’s The Fantastic Journey in 1966. The science fiction film makes them take off.
That same year, she played a prehistoric savage in One Million Years Before Jesus Christ, a tenuous, almost silent film whose only poster will go down in cinema history. Raquel poses there in the famous animal skin bikini, which seems to have been torn to shreds by a wild animal or a hungry caveman.
“People saw me as a sex symbol, but I was actually a single mother with two young children! ‘ she exclaimed half a century later in her autobiography, Beyond the cleavage. “Can you picture me on the poster with one child under my arm and the other in a stroller? That breaks the myth a bit, doesn’t it? »
15 million from MGM
In 1967 she married her Pygmalion in Paris and wore a sensational white net mini dress. Rich, famous, then she went first: gorgeous mansion in Beverly Hills, black marble swimming pool, Rolls-Royce. The Times reported on it in November 1969.
She continued filming into the ’70s but remained confined to her status as a beauty in whatever genres she ventured into. Westerns (Bandolero, A Stallion for Three Bastards), crime films (The Woman in Cement) or comedies (The Animal of Claude Zidi with Belmondo).
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Raquel Welch in 1970
1969’s unreleased erotic scenes with actor Jim Brown in The Hundred Guns and her transgender role in the spoof Myra Breckinridge (1970) didn’t help her change her image. However, she won a Golden Globe for The Three Musketeers in 1973.
Fired by MGM on the Rue de la Sardine set in 1982, she attacked the studio and was fined $15 million for abusive breach of contract. The case doesn’t give him good publicity.
A yoga enthusiast, like Jane Fonda, she started in the wellness business.
After hiding her Latino origins for a long time, the dashing sixty year old embraces her roots and impersonates Hispanics in American Family (2002) or Tortilla Soup (2001).
At 68, she divorced her fourth husband, who was 14 years her junior.