Array
Raquel Welch, whose emergence from the sea in a skimpy, furry bikini in the film “One Million Years B.C.” would propel her to international sex symbol status throughout the 1960s and ’70s, has died. She was 82.
Welch died early Wednesday after a brief illness, according to her agent, Stephen LaManna of the talent agency Innovative Artists.
Welch’s breakthrough came in 1966’s campy prehistoric flick “One Million Years B.C.,” despite having a grand total of three lines. Clad in a brown doeskin bikini, she successfully evaded pterodactyls but not the notice of the public.
„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.“
She did not, playing Lust for the comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their film “Bedazzled” in 1967 and playing a secret agent in the sexy spy spoof “Fathom” that same year.
Her curves and beauty captured pop culture attention, with Playboy crowning her the „most desired woman“ of the ’70s, despite never being completely naked in the magazine.
