This Wednesday, the actress Raquel Welch died at 82 due to a “brief illness.” The star, who rose to fame after her participation in the movie “One Million Years BC,” was an icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Many remember her only as a “sex symbol,” but Welch marked the industry with performances that made her name remain etched forever in the world of cinema.
It was a symbol of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. Joe Raquel Tejada, artistically known as Raquel Welch, died this Wednesday at the age of 82. Her manager assured me that she passed away due to a brief illness.
Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago to an American mother and a Bolivian father. The family moved to San Diego when she was still a child. There, she took ballet and acting classes, and as a teenager, she won beauty pageants. She also worked as a professional model.
Welch broke into the world of acting by playing a prostitute in the Russell Rouse film “A house is not a home” in 1964. But she really rose to fame in 1966 with the sci-fi film “Fantastic Voyage” and the prehistoric adventure “One Million Years B.C.,” which catapulted her as a “sex symbol” by having her appear in a deerskin bathing suit.
She only had a few lines of dialogue in the film, but they were enough to make her a best-selling pinup. Her swimsuit portrait was hung on the walls of many homes around the world. It was a point of no return for her and her career.
“It turned out that I was the lady in the loincloth about whom everyone exclaimed, “My God, what a great body,” attention that I hoped would vanish overnight, but I was wrong,” he told the Associated Press in 1981.
Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, he had other leading and secondary roles in “The Three Musketeers,” “Bedazzled,” “Bandolero!” and “100 Rifles.” And, furthermore, she changed an entire aesthetic trend in Hollywood and put brunette women on the map, leaving behind the stereotype of blonde women.
A hypersexualized actress
However, some feminist critics argue that Welch was one of Hollywood’s hypersexualized women, whose worth was reduced to her physical appearance.Classic dynamics in the film industry have caused mental health problems and self-image distortion in many superstars, from the iconic Marilyn Monroe to Pamela Anderson more recently.
She herself admitted that, despite the fact that she did not regret her acting career, she had mixed feelings about it.
“I enjoyed the fact that my ability to be sexy was celebrated.” But it was limiting. “The truth is that, since my appearance was somewhat exotic, they were never going to give me all the roles that I would have liked,” he told the agency. AP News.
Playboy crowned her “the most desirable woman of the ’70s,” despite the fact that she never appeared fully nude in the magazine. In 2013, she was ranked second on Men’s Health’s “Sexiest Women of All Time” list.
He published his memoir about it, titled ‘Raquel: Beyond the Neckline,’ in 2010.
In addition to being an actress, Welch was a singer, dancer, and businesswoman. She had her own fitness program, “Raquel’s Total Beauty and Fitness Program,” in the 1980s, and later she launched a brand of wigs and hair extensions.
Despite many limiting her to the role of “hot girl,” Raquel surprised many in the industry with her performances. For her role in “The Three Musketeers” (1974), she won a Golden Globe. Other of her most notable performances are the telefilm “Right to Die” (1987), for which role she was again nominated for the Golden Globes; “Wild Party” with James Coco; or “Woman of the Year” on Broadway, where she replaced Lauren Bacall in 1981.
Now, along with his legacy in the world of cinema, he also leaves behind two children and has become a memory that will remain in the minds of an entire generation.
with Reuters and local media
