Whatever Happened to Raquel Welch? Looking at Her Life and Career

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In a 1985 interview with Barbara Walters, she delved a little deeper into her feelings about her image and the pressure arising from the feeling that people are constantly watching you. “You’ve asked for the attention in some way,” she admitted. “You’ve said, ‘Look, I want to be an actress,’ and now people are looking at you and saying things about you. On top of that, if you don’t have many clothes on, you can’t help but feel vulnerable.”

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At the same time, Raquel was quick to differ when it was suggested that Hollywood essentially gave her no choice in how she was presented to the world: “I didn’t have to [go along with it]; nobody twisted my arm. But I did it, because that was my advantage, I was going to use my advantage and I’m glad I did.”

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Though there were frustrations, notably the fact that she was never really able to truly use the image in an acting role. “They cast me as something that was totally different than being sexy or using that,” she told Barbara. “It was the idea that here I was with everybody saying I was a sex symbol, and then people would go to these movies and there was nothing sexy happening and you think, ‘I’ve let them down.’ … I’m a good light comedian and I could have played a really sexy, funny, cute charming girl. Instead, I’m in 100 Rifles or Fathom playing these tough little chicks.”

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While speaking to journalist David Giammarco, Raquel expressed her love for beautiful things like paintings, literature and poems, but there was also her realization that without substance, beauty actually means nothing. She drew a comparison to a plastic flower, how attractive it looks and the desire you may have to inhale the fragrance. But, of course, there isn’t any.

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“I felt like I was sort of in danger of having that happen to me,” she said, “because I think I soaked in too much the way that people were objectifying me and the more that they did, the more I did … I really think that sexuality, if you are a person that can elicit that kind of response, gives you a lot of power in a way. But it’s a very specific thing. It doesn’t really open the door to other things, because sexuality is traditionally something that’s behind closed doors. So really, then, you’re only a fantasy figure. And if you’re a fantasy figure, nobody wants to wake up from the dream. Nobody wants you to be in real situations.”

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Her “situation” began when she was born Jo Raquel Tejada on September 5, 1940 in Chicago. When she was two, the family moved to San Diego and early on in life she developed a desire to perform. The first step on this journey was the studying of ballet from the time that she was seven until she was 17, ultimately giving up that dream when she was told by her instructor that she didn’t have the right figure to succeed.

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With that in mind, she decided to make the figure she did have work for her. When she was 14, she won the titles of Miss Photogenic and Miss Contour in beauty contests. While attending La Jolla High School, she was crowned Miss La Jolla and then, at the San Diego County Fair, she was deemed “The Fairest of the Fair,” Miss San Diego.

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When she was 16, she received what seemed to be her first piece of media coverage, with the February 16, 1957 edition of The Los Angeles Times reporting, “Raquel Tejada has been chosen queen of the 11^th annual Pacific Coast Mid-Winter Glider Soaring Championships … Miss Tejada went aloft in a sailplane for the first time this week at the club’s annual ‘Press Day.’”

And this is on top of the fact that a month earlier she was named “Miss Surf Queen” at a competition at the San Diego Speed Boat Club. Then, in 1958, she was crowned “Maid of California” at the state’s 104^th annual fair.

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A lot happened in 1959. In January she secretly married her high school boyfriend, James Welch, in Las Vegas on January 31. He had been a tuna fisherman, but was going to give that up and enter night school, and Raquel planned on continuing her studies at San Diego State College (she was a freshman at the time).

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She scored some regional theatre roles, and passed the audition and was cast in the title role of The Ramona Pageant — based on Helen Hunt Jackson and Bob Biloe’s novel Ramona — a yearly outdoor play in Hemet, California. In another piece from the Los Angeles Times, this comment was made: “Raquel has had offers from all the major motion picture studios since her selection in February, but she remains calm and philosophical. In an interview, she says, ‘I’m a Latin type and suppose in the movies I were to be cast and typed? I have more serious aspirations. In fact, I like Greek drama most of all.”

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Providing a sense of what had been required of Raquel, the Times commented, “Besides brains, Raquel can qualify as one of California’s prettiest girls.” When asked about her generation and the “beatnik fringe,” she replied, “They’re only a very small part — they have nothing they really like. When you like something so much it sets you on fire, you can’t lose. Not all of us are willing to settle just for security. There is more to life than that.”

Maybe that philosophy played a role in the collapse of her marriage to James Welch, the two of them eventually divorcing in 1964. During the separation, Raquel took their two kids — Damon and Tahnee — to Dallas, where she began earning what she called a “precarious living” working as a model.

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Eventually she moved to Los Angeles where she connected with Hollywood agent Patrick Curtis (they would marry in 1967), who saw great potential in her. As a result, he became her personal and business manager, his first recommendation being, to avoid any sort of typecasting as a Latina, she start using her estranged husband’s last name — thus “Raquel Welch” was born. And it seemed to be working as on December 28, 1963 she was named as playing “a girl” on the New Year’s Eve episode of The Red Skelton Hour and had had a part on The Danny Kate Show.

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In 1964, Raquel had small roles in A House is Not a Home (“Call Girl”) and Elvis’ Roustabout (“College Girl”). And on television she was a regular on The Hollywood Palace as the “Billboard Girl,” and then made several guest appearances on shows like The Virginian, McHale’s Navy and Bewitched. By the end of the year, she and Patrick decided that they would very consciously turn her into a sex symbol (which is where all that “stuff” actually began).

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On December 30, 1964, The Journal News of White Plains, New York, wrote a story headlined, “Starlet is Seeking Sultry Roles,” which talks about Raquel working as the previously mentioned Billboard Girl for “survival money,” and that she had dreams of something bigger. “I think I can fit into roles that ask for glamour, sultriness and sexiness,” she said. “I want to play the girl with problems, not the pretty dumb girl who lives next door. There are too many who fit the part around town right now. I’m not the Anne Bancroft type.”

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She expressed her feeling that stars don’t need theatrical talent so much as they need the right personality. “I don’t see anything as important as publicity,” Raquel opined. “To get a good picture in a big magazine is a goal. It can do wonders for you. And in the beginning, I think local publicity is even more important … I prefer staying away from series, hunting for picture parts. I’m known as a troublemaker by my agency for this attitude, but I believe this is the right way to get ahead.”

She had a parting shot of personal philosophy: “It’s a girl’s duty now to surround herself with experts and let them open the doors. And when they’re open, you’d better be able to do something and not stand there with your thumb in your mouth.”

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She made her point. In 1965 20^th Century Fox announced her as one of the stars of Fantastic Voyage, about a group of people shrunk to microscopic size in a vessel that enters the human body to save someone’s life. Raquel thought this was great, but wasn’t shy about expressing her view that she saw herself as a movie mogul some day, calling the shots.

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“I don’t discount the value of beauty contests for any young aspiring actress,” she told The Newark Advocate, which listed all the contests she’d won. “It was as a result of all my radio, television and newspaper interviews in connection with the beauty contests that I won my first regular TV job. But I really got nowhere, even in Hollywood, until I bought a few sexy, clinging, low-necked dresses. And I’ve never stopped working since.” She added to The Morning Call, “I’m more than happy to pose for cheesecake. I’m well-equipped for it, too. People are still interested in seeing pretty girls, and if they are actresses, so much the better.”

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Raquel was on the right track. Fantastic Voyage (1966) was a huge hit, followed as it would turn out, by three movies she shot while the extensive visual effects were completed on that film. While those films weren’t huge hits (a complete filmography follows later on), she also grabbed a tremendous amount of attention for that same year’s prehistoric drama One Million Years B.C., the plot of which … well, nobody ever cared. It featured Raquel in her fur-lined bikini, which was all anybody talked about anyway. As she herself told the Detroit Free Press, “I had only four words — none of them comprehensible — to utter in the entire film. All the rest had to be conveyed with hands and looks.”

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She would go on to co-star with the likes of Dean Martin (Bandolero!), Frank Sinatra (Lady in Cement), Jim Brown (100 Rifles) and Peter Sellers (The Magic Christian), but those films and others just weren’t what she was looking for.

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In 1970 and again in 1971, Raquel was given the opportunity to showcase her comedic, musical and dancing talents in a pair of TV specials that brought her together with people like Tom Jones and Bob Hope, Raquel! and Really Raquel!. The latter was an adaptation of a night club act she had put together and the only guest stars were The Muppets.

Of the first special, The Charlotte News observed, “It has no ending. Raquel! improves on this by not having a beginning or middle either. What it does have is the actress singing and dancing her way across the world. One songs starts on the steps of the Temple of the Moon on the Street of the Dead in Yucatan and winds up — three countries and five costume changes later — in Europe.”

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Where things made a significant change was 1972’s Kansas City Bomber, which takes an inside look at Roller Games with Raquel playing one of the participants, K.C. Carr. Saying this was the first of her films that she genuinely liked, the actress enthused at the time, “The motivation of the character I play is simply to make a buck in life and to attain a sense of identity. There’s a futility in what she does. The shape of the track is her life: round and round, going nowhere. But the pros, the real skaters who worked with me, they were terrific. Most of them suffer from the same image I do. They’re on skates, they’re padded up, they’re on a raised track. Most people tend to think of these girls as Amazons, but most of them are even smaller than me. They’re not as muscular or as butch as you’d expect. I have a similar problem. Most people are disappointed if the door hinges don’t shatter off when I walk into a room.”

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The very successful — in terms of critics and box office — The Three Musketeers followed (as did its sequel, The Four Musketeers), which led to several more films. But then there was a big falling out over the film Cannery Row — which she had been let go from after a couple of weeks of filming — that turned into a lawsuit (which she won in the amount of $10.8 million), but also resulted in her being blacklisted and therefore unemployable. Refusing to lay down, she gave Broadway a shot, taking Lauren Bacall’s role in Woman of the Year to much fanfare.

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Like many actresses of the era, Raquel ended up finding refuge in TV movies that offered more complex characters and allowed her to turn in some powerful performances in films like The Legend of Walks Far Woman and (especially) Right to Die. Another eight TV movies would follow, as well as guest star appearances, most recently on a 2017 episode of Date My Dad. She did appear in a few movies in the 1990s and 2000s (including Legally Blonde), her most recent big screen role being 2017’s How to Be a Latin Lover.

Additionally, when she wasn’t getting movie work in the 1980s, she launched The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program books and videos that were huge successes.

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She’s been married a total of four times, to James Welch from 1959 to 1964, Patrick Curtis from 1967 to 1972, Andre Weinfeld from 1980 to 1990 and Richard Palmer from 1999 to 2004 (which she says was her last marriage). As previously noted, her two kids are Damon and actress Tahnee Welch.

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Raquel, who authored her 2010 autobiography Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage, has referred to herself as the “Rodney Dangerfield of sex symbols,” which she explained to Men’s Health magazine this way: “I felt like there was always a struggle. There was the perception of, ‘Oh, she’s just a sexpot. She’s just a body. She probably can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.’ In my first couple of movies, I had no dialogue. It was frustrating. And then I started to realize that it came with the territory. Look at somebody like Marilyn Monroe. I always wondered why she seemed so unhappy. Everybody worshipped her and she was so extraordinary and hypnotic on screen. But they never nominated her for any of her musicals or comedies, as good as she was. Because for some reason, somebody with her sex appeal, her indescribable attraction, is rarely taken seriously. Hollywood doesn’t honor comedy and it doesn’t honor sex appeal. And they definitely don’t give awards to either of them. So you always feel a little insecure.”

Sounds like the lady knows from whence she speaks. Still, 80 years in, it seems to have been a pretty amazing life.

Please scroll down for a quick look at Raquel’s film career.

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