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US actress Raquel Welch, who became an international sex symbol in the 1960s, has died at the age of 82. The Hollywood star passed away peacefully on Wednesday morning after a brief illness, her manager said. Widely remembered for playing a bikini-clad cavewoman in the 1966 film One Million Years BC, Welch also won a Golden Globe Award for her performance in 1974's The Three Musketeers. She is often credited as a prototype for action heroines in Hollywood. Born Jo Raquel Tejada in 1940, Welch grew up in California, where she won teen beauty pageants and later became a local weather forecaster. During a brief stint in Dallas, Texas, the divorced mother of two modelled for the Neiman Marcus clothing store and worked as a cocktail waitress.nnHer big break came in 1964 soon after she moved back to California, when she scored cameos in A House Is Not A Home, and Roustabout, a musical starring Elvis Presley.nnBut she shot to prominence two years later, with her back-to-back roles in the sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage and the fantasy film One Million Years BC.nnWelch only had a few lines in the latter, but promotional stills of her wearing a skimpy two-piece deer-skin bikini turned her into a leading pin-up girl of the era. Despite her public image, she long expressed discomfort with the representation of her body, once saying she "was not brought up to be a sex symbol, nor is it in my nature to be one". "The fact that I became one is probably the loveliest, most glamorous and fortunate misunderstanding," she added. Welch went on to address her image in her memoir, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, in which she opened up about her childhood, her early career woes as a single mother in Hollywood, and why she would never lie about her age. She leaves behind a son, Damon Welch, and daughter Tahnee Welch.
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