Raquel Welch’s Incredible Career Took a ‘Toll’ on Her Kids: ‘It Used to Break My Heart’

Raquel Welch never left her Beverly Hills home looking sloppy. “I have to put myself together,” she said. “I will put on a little bit of eyeliner, a little blusher, a little lip gloss. It means you made a little bit of effort to face the world. You need a little armor or protection.”

From the moment she became famous on a poster for the 1966 film One Million Years B.C., Raquel was ready to exceed expectations and prove that she was no empty-headed sex symbol. “I made more than 45 feature films, tackled Broadway musicals, and had my successes,” noted the Golden Globe winner, who always refused to appear nude on screen. She became an icon on her own terms, but that didn’t mean that Raquel, a four-times divorced mother of two, got by without sacrifices.

The actress’ difficult childhood in Southern California likely fueled her ambition. Her Bolivia-born father, an aeronautics engineer, was a bully who lorded over his wife and three children. “A life of female servitude doesn’t appeal to me mainly because I saw my mother being taken for granted,” Raquel wrote in her 2010 memoir, Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage. She aspired to a better life and marriage for herself. “I wasn’t ever willing to settle for the dry, estranged relationship of my parents. I’m allergic to it.”

At 19, Raquel, who was born Jo Raquel Tejada, had to make a choice. Brought up in a churchgoing home, the aspiring ballerina had begun studying theater arts on a scholarship at San Diego State College. She was also madly in love with Jim Welch, her high school sweetheart. “I kept thinking what beautiful children we could make together,” said Raquel, who surrendered to love by dropping out of school and eloping to Las Vegas in 1959. Son Damon arrived the same year and daughter Tahnee followed in 1961.

The couple’s newlywed bliss didn’t last. Marriage and motherhood couldn’t dull Raquel’s desire to become an actress, and her drive was incompatible with Jim’s ideas about home and family. “My breakup with Jim remains the most painful decision of my entire life. For our children’s sake, I should have stayed,” admitted Raquel, who called herself “young” and “pigheaded.”

After a move with the children to Dallas, where she barely survived by waitressing and modeling, Raquel returned west and landed in Los Angeles. Small victories with roles on TV’s Bewitched and McHale’s Navy followed, but there were disappointments, too. The casting director for Gilligan’s Island passed on Raquel for the role of Mary Ann. She came close but ultimately lost the chance to become a Bond girl in 1965’s Thunderball.

When Raquel finally scored a lead role, as monosyllabic, deerskin bikini-wearing Loana in One Million Years B.C., she didn’t expect it to go anywhere. “All I could think was, ‘A dinosaur movie? You’ve got to be kidding me!” she recalled. By the time the movie was released on December 30, 1966, she was a star.

Raquel, who passed earlier this year at age 82, never won an Oscar, but on screen she was engaging, always gorgeous and often surprisingly funny, as in her Golden Globe-winning role as the klutzy dressmaker to the queen in The Three Musketeers. In the 1970s, she also proved her talent as a singer and dancer, with her own Las Vegas nightclub act. “There’s the public thing, the label,” she said of her sex symbol image. “It means money and the chance to do other things.” Raquel would later go on to star on Broadway to great acclaim in Woman of the Year and Victor/Victoria.

Unsurprisingly, her drive to succeed cut into her family life. She admitted with regret that she wasn’t always the most present mother. “When I’m running around the world being Miss Sex Symbol … I couldn’t always be with my children when I wanted to be,” she confessed. “Eventually, I could see that this was taking its toll on my kids, and it used to just break my heart.”

Raquel also paid a price in her romantic life. Following her divorce from Jim, she wed Patrick Curtis, a producer. That marriage lasted five years. Her next union, with French producer-director André Weinfeld, lasted a decade. Her final marriage, to Richard Palmer, a restaurateur, ended after five years. “I don’t regret the marriages. I had real feelings for all of them,” said Raquel, who believed she was “too set in her ways” to make a good wife.

In the final chapter of her life, Raquel became a bigger part of her children’s lives. “I needed to take a lot more initiative and just keep letting them know that I wanted to be there,” she explained. “Fortunately, my children and I have a good relationship, and they’re still my great joy.”