Raquel Welch, actor and 1960s sex symbol, dies aged 82

The actor Raquel Welch has died. She was 82.

The website TMZ first reported the news, citing family members who said Welch died on Wednesday after a short illness.

Welch’s manager confirmed her death to the AFP News agency in an emailed statement and said she died peacefully early on Wednesday morning after “a brief illness”, without providing further details.

The actor became an international icon after appearing in a deerskin bikini in the 1966 British fantasy adventure film One Million Years BC.

While the film received mediocre reviews, Welch’s cavewoman image on its poster became part of cinema history.

Welch, a Golden Globe award winner, starred in more than 30 films, including Fantastic Voyage and The Three Musketeers, as well as some 50 television series in a career spanning five decades.

Born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago in 1940, to a Bolivian father and an American mother, Welch rose to fame and sex symbol status under her new name in the 1960s.

In 2002, she told the New York Times she was proud to acknowledge her Latino roots.

“I’m happy to acknowledge it and it’s long overdue and it’s very welcome,” she said. “There’s been kind of an empty place here in my heart and also in my work for a long, long time.”

She also said that when she set out as an actor, she was told “that if I wanted to be typecast, I would play into” her Hispanic background.

“You just couldn’t be too different. My first big breakthrough part in One Million Years BC, they died my hair blond. It’s a marketing thing.”

In a rare recent interview, with the Scottish Sunday Post in 2017, Welch said her two 1966 hits “made a huge difference to my career. Overnight, I found myself in demand. Before that I was not much more than an extra.”

Subsequent major roles included the title role in Myra Breckinridge (1970) and a key part in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge (1974). She also had a memorable cameo on the TV sitcom Seinfeld, in the episode The Summer of George (1997).

Welch said her first ambition had been to be a ballet dancer, only to learn at 17 that she “really didn’t have the figure for ballet”.

She said she did not mind being widely known for the fur bikini she wore in One Million Years BC.

“I’m often asked if I get sick of talking about that bikini,” she said. “But the truth is, I don’t. It was a major event in my life so why not talk about it?

“Almost every day I get copies of the photo sent to me for an autograph. I must have looked at that photo one million times.

“I remember James Stewart telling me a long time ago never to avoid your fans or the things that your fans like about you. It was good advice.”

However, she did discuss how hard it was to avoid being typecast, writing in her 2010 autobiography Beyond the Cleavage that “all else would be eclipsed by this bigger-than-life sex symbol”.

She continued to act in major films, starring in Hollywood’s first interracial sex scene with Jim Brown in 100 Rifles, and as a transgender heroine in the explicit Myra Breckinridge.

She won the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical for The Three Musketeers, in which she plays the queen’s dressmaker.

While filming Cannery Row in 1982, Welch was fired for insisting on doing her hair and make-up at home. She sued MGM studios for breach of contract, ultimately winning a $15m settlement.

A lover of yoga, Welch later launched herself into the business of wellbeing, publishing her Total Beauty and Fitness program in 1984.

Having long hidden her Latino origins, as an elegant 60-something she took on Hispanic roles in the American Family series on PBS in 2002 and Tortilla Soup in 2001.

In 2008 and aged 68 she divorced her fourth husband, Richard Palmer, who was 14 years her junior.

In later years, Welch continued to act occasionally, but also developed her own line of wigs, hair pieces and hair extensions.

She is survived by her son Damon Welch and her daughter Tahnee Welch.