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The actor Raquel Welch has died. She was 82.
The website TMZ first reported the news, citing family members who said Welch died on Wednesday after a short illness.
Welch’s manager confirmed her death to the AFP News agency in an emailed statement and said she died peacefully early on Wednesday morning after “a brief illness”, without providing further details.
The actor became an international icon after appearing in a deerskin bikini in the 1966 British fantasy adventure film One Million Years BC.
While the film received mediocre reviews, Welch’s cavewoman image on its poster became part of cinema history.
Welch, a Golden Globe award winner, starred in more than 30 films, including Fantastic Voyage and The Three Musketeers, as well as some 50 television series in a career spanning five decades.
Born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago in 1940, to a Bolivian father and an American mother, Welch rose to fame and sex symbol status under her new name in the 1960s.
In 2002, she told the New York Times she was proud to acknowledge her Latino roots.
“I’m happy to acknowledge it and it’s long overdue and it’s very welcome,” she said. “There’s been kind of an empty place here in my heart and also in my work for a long, long time.”
She also said that when she set out as an actor, she was told “that if I wanted to be typecast, I would play into” her Hispanic background.
