Raquel Welch, a US actress who is frequently recognised with establishing the role of the modern action heroine in Hollywood movies, passed away at the age of 82.
After a brief illness, the celebrity died quietly on Wednesday morning, according to her management.
In the 1960s, Welch rose to fame as an international sex icon thanks to her role as a bikini-clad cavewoman in the 1966 movie One Million Years B.C.
She was also awarded a Golden Globe for The Three Musketeers in 1974.
Jo-Raquel Tejada, her birth name, was born in 1940 and won teen beauty pageants while growing up in California, where she eventually worked as a local weather forecaster.
The divorced mother-of-two worked as a cocktail server and a model for Neiman Marcus during a brief stay in Dallas, Texas.
Her major break came in 1964, not long after she returned to Hollywood, when she appeared in the Elvis Presley musicals Roustabout and A House Is Not A Home.
Two years later, she gained notoriety for her appearances in the sci-fi picture Fantastic Voyage and the fantasy film One Million Years BC.
Although Welch only had a few lines in the latter, advertising photos of her in a revealing two-piece deerskin bikini elevated her to the status of a top pin-up of the time.
Despite her outward appearance, she has often voiced discomfort with how her body is portrayed, once stating that she was neither brought up like this nor it was in her nature to be a sex symbol.
“The fact that I became one is probably the loveliest, most glamorous and fortunate misunderstanding,” she added.
In her memoir Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, Welch continued to address her image. There, she talked about her upbringing, her struggles as a young single mother in Hollywood, and why she would never lie about her age.
Over the course of a more than 50-year career, Welch made appearances in more than 30 films and 50 television programmes.
