The Latin American actress, who died on Wednesday February 15 after a brief illness, and consecrated as the most beautiful woman in the world for her role as a naiad in the film One Million Years BChas eternally been brought back to her physique.
After twenty productions, Raquel Welch had suddenly risen to fame thanks to a single film poster, that ofA million years before Christ, quasi-silent film released in theaters in 1966. The actress poses there in a bikini with animal skin that will pass to posterity. While Hollywood is looking for a new icon after the disappearance of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, this image propels the young woman to the rank of sex symbol. A status from which she will find it difficult to detach herself throughout her career.
” People saw me as a sex symbol, but in reality, I was a single mother with two young children! she exclaimed half a century later in her autobiography. Beyond the cleavage (Beyond the neckline). ” Can you imagine me on the poster with one kid under my arm and the other in a stroller? It breaks the myth a bit, no ? “. ” I really had the feeling that people were totally laughing at me, they were only interested in the other woman: the one astride, in a rabbit skin bikini, with this impossible hourglass figure! They were all in love with this kind of superwoman coming straight from the Amazon “, will say again the Latin American actress.
Confined to her beauty status
Born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago on September 5, 1940, to a Bolivian aeronautical engineer and an American, she grew up in California where she learned classical dance. At 14, the young Latin American won the “Miss Photogenic” prize, the first of a long series including “Miss forms”, “Miss beauty among beauties”, “Miss lady of California”.
After a brief marriage to James Welch, a high school dunce with whom she has two children under 20, she moves to Dallas and lives odd jobs as a waitress and a model for suggestive posters. In search of stardom, she returned to Los Angeles in 1963 where she met Patrick Curtis, an enterprising advertising agent, who launched her career. In 1967, she married her Pygmalion in Paris. Rich, famous, she then led the way: sumptuous villa in Beverly Hills, black marble swimming pool, Rolls-Royce. THE Times made its cover in November 1969.
She went on to film in the 70s, but remained confined to her status as a beauty in all the genres in which she ventured. Westerns (Bandolero, One colt for three bastards), Detective movies, detective films (The cement woman) or comedies (the animal by Claude Zidi with Belmondo). In 1969, previously unseen erotic scenes with black actor Jim Brown in the hundred guns and her transgender role in the parody Myra Breckinridge (1970) are controversial. However, she won a Golden Globe for The three Musketeers in 1973. Fired by MGM on the set of Sardine Street in 1982, she attacked the studios and obtained 15 million dollars for wrongful breach of contract. The case does not give him good publicity.
After having hidden her Latin origins for a long time, the dashing sexagenarian then assumes her roots, embodying Hispanic roles in tortilla soup in 2001 or more recently in AmericanFamily.
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(With AFP)