After a horrible battle with a “brief illness,” Hollywood legend 82-year-old Raquel Welch has passed away. Welch was a sex symbol in Hollywood for decades and will forever be remembered in iconic roles that showcased her natural beauty “before breast implants and Botox” were a common occurrence for celebrities to enhance their appearance for the camera. Welch’s manager, Steve Sauer, confirmed the Hollywood legend’s death to People Magazine, saying that the iconic celebrity, who was also a Golden Globe winner, “passed away peacefully early this morning after a brief illness.”
Sauer added, “Her career spanned over 50 years, starring in over 30 films and 50 television series and appearances. The Golden Globe winner, in more recent years, was involved in a very successful line of wigs. Raquel leaves behind her two children, son Damon Welch and her daughter Tahnee Welch.”
Welch was born in Chicago, Illinois, back in 1940. Her parents were a Bolivian-born engineer and his American wife. Welch was an entertainer even as a child, and “by age seven I knew I wanted to be an actress.” And she never let her dream falter, not even for a minute.
“My parents enrolled me in a theater program,” she continued. “You could get away from some of the painfulness of real life. I always had flights of fancy.”
After working hard in the local theater circuit, Welch made her Hollywood debut in the 1960s. Her big break came during the 1966 breakout hit role of “Loana the Fair One” in One Million Years B.C. In this Hollywood favorite, the sex symbol showed off her body in a prehistoric bikini. However, Welch almost didn’t get this big break because she was not very interested in making a “dinosaur movie” at the time but listened to wise counsel that suggested she should pursue the opportunity nevertheless.
“I told (Fox’s studio head) Dick Zanuck I didn’t think I was going to do it because it was a dinosaur movie, and I didn’t want to be caught dead in a dinosaur movie,” Welch once told anchors on Fox News. “And he was not sympathetic to that.”
She added, “He said, ‘No, you’re going to do it, Raquel. And listen, Raqui. You’re going to become a huge star!’ I said, ‘What? What am I even going to wear? What happened in dinosaur time?… He said, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll figure something out.’ And they sure did.”
Less than a decade later, Welch earned her way into Hollywood legend by winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her role in the 1973 classic film The Three Musketeers. She later described her work on this film as one of the best moments of her career.
“Every single [film] contributed to my [transition],” she said. “I played a lot of action figures, like in Westerns… I carried a gun. I was a very formidable woman who could handle herself, who could ride and shoot.”
“I also showed myself in a lot of different periods of time,” Welch continued. “I worked in Spain for a lot of the Westerns, which is where most American Westerns were filmed.”
Rest in peace, Raquel Welch. You will be missed.