Who was Raquel Welch, this actress and cinema icon of the ’60s and ’70s?
Crowned the ‘Most Beautiful Woman Alive’, Hollywood actress Raquel Welch died on Wednesday February 15 at the age of 82
beauty contests
Rachel Welchpassed away peacefully this morning after a short illness “Explained his manager yesterday in a press release sent to AFP. Born on September 5, 1940 as the son of a Bolivian aeronautical engineer and an American father, the Californian was there early on beauty pageants where she is unanimous. At 14, she won Miss Photogenic, the first in a long line of Miss Shapes, Miss Beauty of Beauties, or even Miss California Young Lady. She takes her name from a first marriage to James Welch, a high school dope, with whom she has two children under the age of 20. Her agent Patrick Curtis, whom she met in 1963, convinced her keeping that name to hide his Latino origins.
While stringing together small commissions and salacious photos for magazines, Raquel threw herself into the cinema, where she initially worked as an extra until she became a film actress The Craftsman 1964, where she appeared alongside Elvis Presley. But it really is the sci-fi movie The fantastic journey by Richard Fleischer in 1966, which caught the attention of major Hollywood studios. This time she’s headlining and her career is finally picking up steam.
A reluctant sex symbol
« People saw me as a sex symbol but the reality was I was a single mom with two young kids! »she confided years later in her autobiography Beyond the cleavage. The tragedy, if we can call it that, of Raquel Welch is that we’ve systematically preferred emphasizing her beauty rather than her acting — the work that pushed the actress forwardu Status of the universal sex symbol is the role of the cave naiad in the animal skin bikini for the feature film A million years before Jesus Christ by Don Chaffey. At that moment she embodied the woman in all her beauty, wild and irresistible. Her outfit in the film embodies a certain modernity for the 1960s, so to speak “The first woman in the world to wear a bikini” which become very popular afterwards.
Raquel Welch has therefore continued to fuel the fantasies, particularly with films like fantasies, or the iconic photo of the cave woman that was already circulating before the release of Don Chaffey’s film. Not to mention all the swimsuit brand modeling photos she took in her early days. However, Raquel Welch has played with the greatest actors of her generation james stewart, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin or Marcello Mastroianni. Ditto on the female side, in the sketch girl alena, she answers the stars Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale etc Nasturtium.
A great career
We can still say that the actress has had a great career. After playing alongside the greatest, even if she was limited to the roles of pretty girls, Raquel gets one Golden Globe for Best Actress for his appearance in The Three Musketeers 1975 She was even honored1996 a star on the famous Los Angeles Walk of Fame. She even played with Jean Paul Belmondo L’Animal (1977) Directed by Claude Zidi, a beautiful comedy with an original soundtrack by Vladimir Cosma. Raquel Welch will have preceded her whole life and had 4 husbands: James Welch, Patrick Curtis, André Weinfeld and Richard Palmer. The star is survived by her two children, son Damon and daughter Tahnee Welch.
