Actress Raquel Welch, who helped reshape the traditional image of the Hollywood sex symbol in an era when the movie industry was still overtly defining an idealized version of sensuality for mass consumption, died on Wednesday at age 82.
Her death following a brief illness was confirmed in a statement released by her Los Angeles-based manager.
Welch first grabbed the public’s attention with her role in the 1966 sci-fi adventure “Fantastic Voyage,” playing a member of a miniaturized medical team injected into the body of an injured diplomat and memorable for the skin-tight diving suit she wore in a scene where she was attacked by antibodies.
Her success in that film was followed by an iconic appearance later the same year in the prehistoric fantasy drama “One Million Years B.C.” depicting cavemen and women coexisting with dinosaurs.
Although Welch had just a few lines of dialogue in “B.C.,” still photos of her appearance in a deer-skinned bikini made her a best-selling pinup and a global symbol.
Other screen credits in the late 1960s and early ’70s included starring roles in “Bedazzled,” “Bandolero!” “100 Rifles,” and the title roles in “Myra Breckinridge” and “Hannie Caulder.”
She won a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a musical or comedy for her performance in the 1973 swashbuckling romp “The Three Musketeers.”
Her portrayal of strong, willful characters was credited with helping break down stereotypes at a time when the sexual revolution and changing attitudes toward gender roles converged to empower women on screen, even if their looks remained objectified.
“Raquel Welch enters into the arena of the American culture industry in a time when one of the products that rolled off the assembly line of that industry was sex symbol,” said Robert Thompson, a media scholar at Syracuse University and founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
“She came to represent a certain kind of sensuality for this culture that Aphrodite did for classical culture,” Thompson said, adding that Welch had also been “an accomplished actor … who helped to define the kinds of roles that women could play in a society that had some highly compromised ideas about gender.”
