The actress and sexual icon of Hollywood from the 70s has died this Wednesday at the age of 82. Her relatives have been in charge of confirming the sad news, although they have not revealed details, only that Raquel Welch she had been diagnosed with an illness a few months ago.
Jo Raquel Tejada was born on September 5, 1940 in Chicago. She started acting at a very young age and participated in numerous ballet and beauty pageants before making the leap to the big screen as a walk-on in an Elvis Presley film. Her first leading role was A Swingin’ Summer, in 1965, and turned her into a true sex-symbol. She performed with the best in the history of the seventh art (Frank Sinatra, Marcelo Mastroianni, Burt Reynolds…) and won a Golden Globe in 74 for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical for The Three Musketeers, an adaptation of Dumas’s book. His performance in A million years ago, like the intrepid Loana, he fell in love with the entire world and gave him the nickname with which he would go down in history: ‘the Body’.
His love resume was also very prolific. She married? at 19 years old with James Welch (from which he took his stage name) and they had two children: Damon and Tahnee. They divorced in 1965 and only two years later, Raquel remarried with her manager, Patrick Curtis. The mixture of personal and professional relationship did not work; The actress’s career in the cinema began to decline and she divorced in 1972. She still married two more times: with Andrew Weinfeld in 1980 and with Richard Palmer in 1990 (pictured), from whom he parted ways in 2011.
