R.I.P.: Raquel Welch, Actress, Iconic Sex Symbol

Raquel Welch (1940-2023)

Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image for a half-century in show business, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82, reports The NYTimes.

Ms. Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight by the throat with her defiant, alert-to-everything, take-no-prisoners stance and her dancer’s body. She was 26. It had been four years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.

Camille Paglia, the feminist critic, described the poster photograph as “the indelible image of a woman as queen of nature.” Ms. Welch, she went on, was “a lioness — fierce, passionate and dangerously physical.”

When Playboy in 1998 named the 100 sexiest female stars of the 20th century, Ms. Welch came in third — right after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Brigitte Bardot was fourth.

Despite a career based largely on sex appeal, Ms. Welch repeatedly refused to appear nude onscreen. “Personally, I always hated feeling so exposed and vulnerable” in love scenes, she wrote in her memoir, noting that even when she appeared in a prestigious Merchant Ivory film (“The Wild Party,” 1975), the filmmakers, those acclaimed arbiters of art-house taste, pressured her to do a nude bedroom scene, to no avail.

Jo-Raquel Tejada was born in Chicago on Sept. 5, 1940, the oldest of three children of Armando Carlos Tejada, a Bolivian-born aeronautical engineer, and Josephine Sarah (Hall) Tejada, an American of English descent. They had met as students at the University of Illinois.

When Raquel was 2, the family moved to Southern California for her father’s work in the war effort. At 7, encouraged by her mother, she enrolled at San Diego Junior Theater, where her only early disappointment was being cast in her first play as a boy. She began ballet classes the same year and continued to study dance for a decade.

Welch went on to star in over 30 films and 50 television series and appearances over her more than 50-year career and earned a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy or Musical for her work in 1973's The Three Musketeers. Her other films included 100 Rifles, Bandolero!, The Prince and the Pauper, Bedazzled, Myra Breckenridge, Chairman of the Board, Legally Blonde, and her final film in 2017, How to Be a Latin Lover. In addition to her acting career, Welch was a successful entrepreneur of jewelry, skincare, and wig lines. She is survived by her son Damon Welch and daughter Tahnee Welch from her marriage to the first of her four husbands, James Welch.