Necrology Raquel Welch (1940-2023)
Immigrant daughter Raquel Welch made a career in Hollywood on his own. She was praised for her role in 'The Three Musketeers' (1975) and euthanasia drama 'Right to Die' (1988).
Born in Chicago in 1940, the actress is considered one of the great sex symbols of the sixties and seventies. The daughter of a Bolivian immigrant who found work as an aerospace engineer in the US broke through when she won a series of MISS elections as a teenager in California. This earned her a job as a weatherwoman at a local TV station, putting her in the spotlight at Hollywood studios.
On your own
With her roles, Welch broke the stereotypical image that sex symbols could only be blonde dolls and not strong women at the same time. It gave the actress a unique status that she could rely on all her life. But the stigma also bothered her, she said in 2007: βThe feminists had a clear opinion about me: I was the 'sex object'. That annoyed me. I thought: here I am, I am a mother, I am alone, I got there all by myself, with guts and luck. People think I'm sexy, yes. Is that bad? I'm not a scholar, I'm in show business!β
The poster of Welch in a fur bikini, an image from the movie One Million Years BC (1966), became one of the best-selling posters ever: it ended up on the wall in tens of millions of teenage rooms around the world.
The crucial supporting role that the print played in the nineties in the acclaimed Stephen King film adaptation The Shawshank Redemption confirmed the iconic status of the image. Welch's other successful films in that period included Bedazzled (1967), Bandolero! (1968) and 100 Rifles (1969).
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