Raquel Welch: a strong and powerful personality with a rarely-tapped gift for comedy

The term “sex symbol” reeks of a bygone age of smirking sexism, and very often female stars landed with this tag would be given some exotic outfit. Ursula Andress had her ivory-white bikini with chunky belt buckle in Dr No; Jane Fonda had her sleek one-piece with black stripes and thigh-length boots as the glam astronaut in Barbarella.

But the most outrageous piece of sex-symbol costuming of all time was given to Raquel Welch, who was called upon to rock a revealing doeskin two-piece in her role as Loana the Fair One in the 1966 dinosaur adventure One Million Years BC, featuring stop-motion dino action by Ray Harryhausen, and based on the less-than-scientific notion that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.

Related: Raquel Welch: a life in pictures

Loana was the ultrasexy cavebabe who had three lines in the film, but the poster image of Welch in this quite extraordinary outfit made her a legend. Welch became naughty-but-nice shorthand for a luscious star that blokes of all ages would secretly or not-so-secretly lust after; a sort of sitcom gag, like dads watching Top of the Pops and waiting for Pan’s People to come on.

Kenneth Branagh’s recent movie Belfast has a shot of Welch entrancing a saucer-eyed family audience in this film. And in fact, Welch became even more of a legend in Britain for a publicity stunt in 1972, when – in London to promote her British-produced western Hannie Caulder – she declared herself to be a Chelsea FC fan, dressed up in Chelsea strip for the photographers and went to a Chelsea home match against Leicester City in the itchy-bearded company of Jimmy Hill. Welch was a strong, powerful personality, who didn’t simper or blush but looked permanently amused, as if she could eat any of her admirers for breakfast.

In fact, Welch had cult-classic moments before and after her ersatz-Jurassic apotheosis. She had appeared with Frank Sinatra in a now-forgotten mystery called Lady in Cement (and in fact had a tiny appearance in the Elvis Presley film Roustabout). She had been one of the crew in the amazing sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage, shrunk to microscopic size and sent into the body of an important scientist to repair his brain – and inevitably she had to model a figure-hugging wetsuit.

In Stanley Donen’s Bedazzled, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in which hapless Dudley sells his soul to the devil, Welch appears as the figure of Lilian Lust who clambers into bed with him wearing ketchup-red lingerie. Welch got no critical respect for her lead performance in the little-liked movie version of Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge in 1970: her playing a transgender character is perhaps the least of the film’s problems.

But like so many performers stuck with the “sex symbol” job description, Welch had a gift for comedy which was sometimes indulged and sometimes not: she scored a great success with her performance as the sly Constance de Bonacieux in Richard Lester’s all-star Dumas romps The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, having a steamy indiscretion with Michael York’s D’Artagnan.

And she has real presence in James Ivory’s Hollywood Golden Age drama The Wild Party from 1975 (an influence on Damien Chazelle’s Babylon), in which she plays the loyal mistress of a has-been star who is hosting an orgy for influential moguls.

Her celebrity in the 1970s was colossal and it’s a pity that no film-maker could quite bring out of her that combination of drollery and brassy physical strength that could well have produced a tremendous comedy. But she was an icon: a sexy warrior who was more than a match for human or dinosaur.