Actress
Raquel Welch
has died at 82 after a short illness.
She writes the site Tmz citing sources of the family.
Sex symbol of the 60s and 70s, after the beginnings in small parts - in 1964 in the films Madame P... and her girls by
Russell Rouse
starring
Shelley Winters and Robert Taylor,
and alongside
Elvis Presley
in The Singer of the
Luna Park by John Rich
- Raquel burst into the imagination for the role of the buxom Loana in
Don Chaffey's One Million Years Ago
: The movie poster, released in 1966, featuring Welch in a provocative suede bikini, had become a collector's item.
Other sex symbol roles had followed, including Leslie H. Martinson's
Fathom
(1967) opposite
Anthony Franciosa and
Stanley Donen's
My Friend the Devil (1967)
, starring
Dudley Moore and Peter Cook
.
Also in 1966, the only female protagonist, she had entered the science fiction film
Hallucinating Journey
, which had decreed its real success.
Raquel Welch
Over time, Welch had also managed to be appreciated as an actress in more serious roles.
She had earned two Golden Globe nominations, winning one in 1975 for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for her role as Constance Bonacieux in The Three Musketeers with Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston
(the second nomination was for the television role in When to Die by Paul Wendkos).
"On my first day on set Faye came up to me to tell me she was a big fan of mine: 'But maybe you don't know they're all waiting for us to gouge out each other's eyes. Let's make them have fun,'" she later told the 'New York Post' in a 2012 interview. In 1995 Empire magazine had named her one of the 100 sexiest stars in the history of cinema, for Playboy she was in third place among the supersexy stars of the twentieth century, but Raquel saw things differently.
Raquel Welch
"I was happy that I had made it and that I could have had a career, but at the same time I didn't see myself like that," she wrote in her memoir 'Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage' about the role in A Million Years Ago : "
I wasn't in a position to say, 'No thanks, I'd rather do Shakespeare
."
Welch's acting career had an Italian chapter with the comedy Spara forte, più forte... non capito!
from 1966 by Eduardo De Filippo shot between Naples and Cinecitta' by Joe Levine.
"Raquel proved to be very good, especially in comedy", Marcello Mastroianni, her costar, had praised her: "And comedy is much more difficult than drama".
From the same year, 'Le Fate', in the
episode directed by Mauro Bolognini.
The other three protagonists of the shorts were
Capucine, Claudia Cardinale and Monica Vitti
.