Iconic actress Raquel Welch, who started her career in the movie business in films such as Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C., has passed away at the age of 82, as reported by Variety.
What’s Happening:
- Welch was under contract at Twentieth Century Fox, which led to her iconic role in Fantastic Voyage alongside Stephen Boyd.
- The medical sci-fi film concerned an important scientist suffering from a possibly fatal blood clot; a team of scientists and their vessel are shrunk down to microscopic size so they may enter his body and repair the damage. The film won Oscars for best visual effects and art direction.
- That same year, she appeared scantily clad in strips of fur in the prehistoric fantasy film One Million Years B.C., which made her into an international sex symbol.
- Following her career starting performances, Welch went on to appear in the controversial adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Beckrinridge, as well as The Three Musketeers and its sequel, The Four Musketeers: Milady’s Revenge.
- She was one of the first women to play the lead role — not the romantic interest — in a Western, the 1971 revenge tale Hannie Caulder.
- Welch was the featured guest star in a Season 3 episode of The Muppet Show, in which she sings “Confide in Me” to comfort Fozzy, and performs a duet of “I’m a Woman” with Miss Piggy.
- In more recent years, she appeared in a variety of television roles on networks such as Lifetime and The Hallmark Channel.
- The actor had no regrets about her career, but looks “at her sex-symbol years with mixed feelings,” she told the AP. “I enjoy the fact that I was celebrated in that capacity,” she said. “It was limiting, though. But the truth of the matter is that because my look was kind of exotic, I was never going to get cast in all the roles that I’d like to get cast in.”