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LOS ANGELES — Actress Raquel Welch, who helped reshape the standard picture of the Hollywood intercourse image in an period when the film trade was nonetheless overtly defining an idealized model of sensuality for mass consumption, died on Wednesday at age 82.
Her demise following a quick sickness was confirmed in a press release launched by her Los Angeles-based supervisor.
Ms. Welch first grabbed the general public’s consideration together with her function within the 1966 sci-fi journey Incredible Voyage, enjoying a member of a miniaturized medical staff injected into the physique of an injured diplomat and memorable for the skin-tight diving go well with she wore in a scene the place she was attacked by antibodies.
Her success in that movie was adopted by an iconic look later the identical yr within the prehistoric fantasy drama One Million Years B.C. depicting cavemen and ladies coexisting with dinosaurs.
Though Ms. Welch had just some traces of dialogue in B.C., nonetheless pictures of her look in a deer-skinned bikini made her a best-selling pinup and a world image.
Different display credit within the late Nineteen Sixties and early ’70s included starring roles in Bedazzled, Bandolero!, 100 Rifles, and the title roles in Myra Breckinridge and Hannie Caulder.
She received a Golden Globe Award for greatest actress in a musical or comedy for her efficiency within the 1973 swashbuckling romp The Three Musketeers.
Her portrayal of robust, willful characters was credited with serving to break down stereotypes at a time when the sexual revolution and altering attitudes towards gender roles converged to empower ladies on display, even when their seems remained objectified.
“Raquel Welch enters into the sector of the American tradition trade in a time when one of many merchandise that rolled off the meeting line of that trade was intercourse image,” mentioned Robert Thompson, a media scholar at Syracuse College and founding director of the Bleier Middle for Tv and In style Tradition.
“She got here to signify a sure sort of sensuality for this tradition that Aphrodite did for classical tradition,” Mr. Thompson mentioned, including that Ms. Welch had additionally been “an completed actor … who helped to outline the sorts of roles that ladies might play in a society that had some extremely compromised concepts about gender.”
‘BEYOND CLEAVAGE’
Playboy journal as soon as ranked Ms. Welch No. 3 in its “100 Sexiest Stars of the 20th Century,” and although she posed for the journal in 1979, she by no means did a completely nude photograph shoot.
In a 2010 memoir and self-help information titled Raquel: Past the Cleavage, she wrote: “I’ve positively used my physique and intercourse attraction to benefit in my work, however all the time inside limits.”
She added: “I really feel strongly {that a} girl’s thriller is a part of her attraction; and the ability of the creativeness is stronger and provocative than graphic on-camera intercourse or express nudity.”
She performed a tricky frontier spouse out for revenge in Hannie Caulder, a Native American revolutionary with a vendetta in 100 Rifles, and a dressmaker to the queen in The Three Musketeers.
Her title function within the 1970 comedy movie Myra Breckinridge, primarily based on the Gore Vidal novel of the identical identify, stirred controversy round Ms. Welch’s portrayal of a transgender girl who undergoes sex-change surgical procedure and later forcibly sodomizes a person with a strap-on dildo.
The movie, a field workplace flop lambasted by critics and disavowed by Mr. Vidal as “an terrible joke,” additionally featured John Huston, Mae West, Farrah Fawcett, and Rex Reed, amongst others.
She was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago. Her father was an aeronautical engineer from Bolivia. Her household moved to California when she was younger. She later studied ballet earlier than getting into a sequence of magnificence contests.
She briefly earned a dwelling as a mannequin and cocktail waitress earlier than making use of for movie roles and breaking into the film enterprise with small 1964 roles within the drama A Home Is Not a House and the Elvis Presley musical Roustabout.
She went on to a profession spanning greater than half a century, showing in additional than 30 movies and 50 tv sequence, and as an entrepreneur was concerned in a profitable line of wigs, HairUWear, in addition to a group of jewellery and skin-care merchandise. — Reuters
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