Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image in a show business career that lasted a half-century, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Her death was confirmed by her son, Damon Welch. No cause was given.
Ms. Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight by the throat with her defiant, alert-to-everything, take-no-prisoners stance and dancer’s body. She was 26. It had been three years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.
Camille Paglia, the feminist critic, described the poster photograph as “the indelible image of a woman as queen of nature.” Ms. Welch, she went on, was “a lioness — fierce, passionate and dangerously physical.”
When Playboy in 1998 named the 100 sexiest female stars of the 20th century, Ms. Welch came in third — right after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Brigitte Bardot was fourth.
Throughout her career, Ms. Welch was publicly admired more for her anatomy than for her dramatic abilities. She even called her 2010 book — a memoir cum self-help guide — “Beyond the Cleavage.”
But when she had a chance to show off her comic abilities, the critics were sometimes kinder. Ms. Welch won a Golden Globe for her role in Richard Lester’s 1973 adaptation of “The Three Musketeers”; her character was a hopelessly klutzy 17th-century Frenchwoman, torn between two lives — as a landlord’s wife and the queen’s seamstress.
Despite a career based largely on sex appeal, Ms. Welch repeatedly refused to appear nude onscreen. “Personally, I always hated feeling so exposed and vulnerable” in love scenes, she wrote in her memoir, noting that even when she appeared in a Merchant Ivory film (“The Wild Party,” 1975), those acclaimed arbiters of art-house taste pressured her to do a nude bedroom scene.
“I’ve definitely used my body and sex appeal to advantage in my work, but always within limits,” she said. But, she added, “I reserve some things for my private life, and they are not for sale.”
A full obituary will be published soon.
Michael Levenson contributed reporting.
