Raquel Welch, star of Fantastic Voyage, One Million Years B.C., dead at 82 | CBC News

Raquel Welch, the film actor whose sultry, curvaceous looks made her a leading sex symbol of the 1960s and ’70s, has died at age 82.

Welch died early Wednesday after a brief illness, according to her agent, Stephen LaManna of the talent agency Innovative Artists.

Welch came to the wide attention of moviegoers for her role in the 1966 sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage, followed by her iconic appearance later that year in the prehistoric drama One Million Years B.C.

Although Welch had just a few lines of dialogue in B.C., memorable images of her appearance in a deer-skin bikini made her a bestselling pinup that transformed her into a global sex symbol.

“I just thought it was a goofy dinosaur epic we’d be able to sweep under the carpet one day,” she told The Associated Press in 1981.

“Wrong. It turned out that I was the Bo Derek of the season, the lady in the loin cloth about whom everyone said, ‘My God, what a bod’ and they expected to disappear overnight.”

From Hollywood to Broadway

But she didn’t disappear. In 1967, she portrayed Lilian Lust, one of the seven deadly sins in 1967’s Bedazzled, starring the comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. She also played a secret agent in the sexy spy spoof Fathom that same year.

Other screen credits in the late 1960s and early 1970s included starring roles in Bandolero!, 100 Rifles, Myra Breckinridge and Hannie Caulder.

Her curves and beauty captured pop culture attention, with Playboy crowning her the “most desired woman” of the ’70s, despite the fact that she never appeared completely naked in the magazine. And as recently as 2013, Welch nabbed the No. 2 spot on Men’s Health’s “Hottest Women of All Time” list.

In the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, the iconic image of Welch in One Million Years B.C. was the last of three posters used by prisoner Andy Dufresne to cover his escape tunnel, the first two being Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe.

In addition to film and television acting, Welch was a singer and dancer. She surprised many critics and won positive reviews when she starred in the 1981 musical Woman of the Year on Broadway, replacing a vacationing Lauren Bacall. She returned to the Broadway stage in 1997’s Victor/Victoria.

Welch knew that some people didn’t take her seriously because of her glamorous image. “I’m not Penny Marshall or Barbra Streisand,” she told the AP in 1993. “They’ll say, ‘Raquel Welch wants to direct? Give me a break.'”

Sex symbol and single mother

Welch was born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago and raised in La Jolla, Calif. (The Jo in her name was from her mother, Josephine). Welch was a divorced mother when she met ex-actor turned press agent Patrick Curtis.

“The irony of it all is that even though people thought of me as a sex symbol, in reality I was a single mother of two small children!” she wrote in her autobiography, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.

Curtis became her manager and second husband and helped shape her into a glamour-girl with hundreds of magazine covers and a string of movies, plus exercise videos and books like The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program.

Though she would sometimes appear in exploitation films, Welch also surprised many in the industry with fine performances, including in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, which earned her a Golden Globe, and opposite James Coco in Wild Party. She was also nominated for a Globe in 1988 for the TV movie Right to Die.

Married and divorced four times, she is survived by two children, Damon Welch and Tahnee Welch, who also became an actor, landing a featured role in 1985’s Cocoon.