‘One Million Years B.C.’ star Raquel Welch passes away aged 82

Raquel Welch, whose emergence from the sea in a skimpy furry bikini in One Million Years B.C. which would propel her to international sex symbol status in the 1960s and 1970s, died. She was 82. Welch died early Wednesday after a brief illness, according to her agent Stephen LaManna of the Innovative Artists talent agency.

Welch's breakthrough came in the 1966 prehistoric film One Million Years B.C., despite having a total of three lines. Clad in a brown dokin bikini, she successfully avoided the pterodactyls, but not the public eye.

“I just thought it was a goofy dinosaur epic that we could sweep under the rug one day,” she told The Associated Press in 1981. “Wrong. I turned out to be the Bo Derek of the season, the lady in the loin cloth that everyone said, 'Oh my god, that's the point' and expected to disappear overnight." She didn't, playing Lust for the comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their film Bedazzled in 1967, and the same year she played a secret agent in the sexy spy spoof Fathom.

Her curves and beauty caught the attention of pop culture, and Playboy crowned her the "Most Desirable Woman" of the 1970s, even though she was never completely nude in the magazine. In 2013, she was ranked second on Men's Health's "Hottest Women of All Time". In The Shawshank Redemption, a poster of Welch covers the escape tunnel - the last of three used by Andy Dufresne's (Tim Robbins) character after Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Admirers took to Twitter to mourn the star, including TV host Rosie O'Donnell, actor Chris Meloni and writer-director Paul Feig, who worked with Welch on Sabrina the Teenage Witch, calling her "The kind, funny, true superstar that I was almost all childhood in love. We have lost a true icon."

In addition to acting, Welch was a singer and dancer. She surprised many critics—and received positive reviews—when she starred in the Broadway musical Woman of the Year in 1981, replacing the vacationing Lauren Bacall. She returned to the Great White Way in 1997 in the film "Victor/Victoria". She knew that some people did not take her seriously because of her glamorous image. “I'm not Penny Marshall or Barbra Streisand,” she told the AP in 1993. “They say, 'Raquel Welch wants to direct? Leave me alone."

Welch was born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago and raised in La Jolla, California. (Yes in her name was from her mother Josephine). Welch was a divorced mother when she met former actor turned press agent Patrick Curtis. "The irony of it all is that even though people saw me as a sex symbol, I was actually a single mother of two young children!" she wrote in her autobiography, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage.

Curtis became her manager and second husband and helped shape her into a beauty with hundreds of magazine covers, a string of movies, exercise videos and books like "The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program."

Although she appeared in exploitation films, she also surprised many in the industry with great performances, including Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers, for which she won a Golden Globe, and opposite James Coke in Wild Party. In 1988, she was also nominated for a Globe for the television film The Right to Die. In an episode of Seinfeld, she played herself and mocked the divas, memorably attacking Elaine and rattling Kramer.

Married and divorced four times, she is survived by two children, Damon Welch and Tahnee Welch, who also became an actress, including landing the lead role in 1985's cocoon.