Raquel Welch is a cultural icon. People across the world know who she is but very few people know anything about her.

Her new book is showing her in a way we’ve never seen her before. The book, “Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage,” explains how a single poster created an image that has stuck with her for decades.

Raquel says the book title was a funny way for her to acknowledge that her identity was eclipsed by a physical, voluptuary image.

In many ways, the poster of Raquel in a scanty, fur-trimmed bikini for the 1966 movie “One Million Years B.C.” made her a mute, Raquel says.

She says she went on to make 45 other movies, worked with great directors and actors and won a Golden Globe, but that one movie, in which she had very few lines of dialogue, forever created the image that she was a woman who was seen but rarely heard. She said it was very frustrating as an actor and a woman.

Now 70 years old, Raquel looks back on her career and explains how she experienced something men and women everywhere deal with — ageism in the workplace.

She’s also done a lot of thinking about the evolution of women over the past 40 years in the workplace and at home.

Find out how she took a lot of negatives at home and work and took them in a new direction. Today, she says she’s happier, more fulfilled and in many ways more successful than ever.

Raquel wants everyone to know that life doesn’t end at 40 or 50 — it’s the beginning of a new, exciting chapter that she says just keeps getting better and better each year.