Raquel Welch pictured in June 1996.
Los Angeles – American film star Raquel Welch died this morning at the age of 82 after a short illness. According to foreign agencies, this was announced by her family. During her career, she made dozens of adventure films and westerns, for example 100 Rifles (1969) or The Beast (1977) with the Frenchman Jean-Paul Belmond. She first shone in the film A Million Years Before Christ (1966), in which she appeared in daring leather suits.
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For many viewers, Welch was one of the sex symbols of the movie screen in the 60s and 70s, which was also noticed by cultural magazines. In 1995, the British magazine Empire placed her almost at the top of the list of “100 sexiest movie stars in history” and Playboy magazine called her the third “sexiest star of the 20th century”, according to TMZ.com.
The actress with South American roots, whose real name is Jo Raquel Tejada, was born in 1940 in Chicago. She was the eldest of three children of a Bolivian engineer and an English actress. At the age of two, she moved to California with her parents. From an early age, she sang, danced and acted in school plays. In Hollywood, Welch initially made a living as a model, bar waitress or weather announcer.
Welch was married four times in her life, first in 1959 and last in 1999. With her however, she divorced her last husband a few years after the wedding and has not remarried since 2004.
