LOSS OF AN ICON
HOLLYWOOD actress and sex symbol Raquel Welch has died at the age of 82.
Welch passed away on Wednesday morning after suffering from a brief illness, her family told TMZ.
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The actress rose to fame in 1966 for her break-out roles in Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C.
She became known as a sex symbol in the 1960s after dawning a small deerskin bikini in One Million Years B.C.
Welch was named one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in Film History in a 1995 issue of Empire magazine while ranking third in Playboy's 100 Sexiest Stars of the 20th Century.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Welch's acting career skyrocketed.
Some of her big films were Bedazzled, Bandolero!, 100 Rifles, and Myra Breckinridge.
She won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her role in the 1973 film The Three Musketeers.
Welch was friends with Cher, appearing on The Cher Show in 1975 to perform the song I'm a Woman with Cher.
She is survived by her two children, Tahnee and Damon Welch, who were from her fourth marriage with Richard Palmer, which lasted from 1999 to 2004.
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She was previously married to James Welch from 1959 to 1964, Patrick Curtis from 1967 to 1972, and Andre Weinfeld from 1980 to 1990 before she tied the knot with Palmer.
In 2015 on Piers Morgan's Life Stories, Welch said her marriages didn't work out because she doesn't "like to have a man."
"Because I'm too set in my ways," she explained,
"I like what I do, I actually enjoy being me and I make a very good living at it and I'm happy.
Welch added: "I don't have to have a man."
POSING FOR PLAYBOY
The star was approached dozens of times by Playboy to pose nude, but she refused to strip down for fear of upsetting her father.
In 2015, she told the Daily Mail: "I am my father's daughter and that's just not the way you behave.
"You don't do that if you are a certain kind of a woman and that's the kind of woman I was raised to be.
"He was a tough customer. He was complicated. He was very intense. He was a strict father.
She added: "He used to say, 'You are not leaving the house dressed like that, what is happening with your hair?' I was terrified of him.
"There were times when I disliked him quite a lot but I wanted to please him.
"He was the one that was so hard to please and the one I wanted to please."
While Welch did eventually agree to pose for Playboy, she insisted that there would be no nudity.
This didn't sit well with Playboy publisher Hugh Heffner, so he ended up dropping the pictures, Welch recalled on Piers Morgan's Life Stories in 2015.
TROUBLED UPBRINGING
Welch opened up to Piers Morgan about her troubled relationship with her father.
"He did not treat my mother very nicely," Welch said in 2015.
"She was such a wonderful woman. She was lovely and pretty and he was not treating her well.
"I thought, 'Boy, that is not going to happen to me.'"
One day, Welch stood up to her father in an effort to protect her mother.
"He looked at me as if I was from the moon," she said. "He was so shocked."
"He was cruel and demeaning and my mother was a wonderful beautiful woman."
Welch also got unwanted attention from older men when she was a young girl.
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"I started taking ballet classes when I was about seven then as time went on, a couple of years and so, I would take my bus tokens and wait at the bus stop and as cars drove by a lot of men would slow down and offer me a ride, which is a little bit unsettling," she told Morgan.
"But I did get the message that they were interested in me. I got the message that they thought I was yummy."