Raquel Welch

Raquel Welch: The Poster That Ate the Career

She had three lines of dialogue. That was the entire speaking part in *One Million Years B.C.*, the 1966 Hammer picture Twentieth Century Fox loaned her out for, and it did not matter in the slightest, because the publicity still — a woman in a deerskin bikini against a prehistoric sky — became one of the best-selling posters ever printed and made Raquel Welch famous on every continent simultaneously. It was the making of her and the trap she spent the next fifty years working against. "I was not brought up to be a sex symbol," she said, "nor is it in my nature to be one. The fact that I became one is probably the loveliest, most glamorous, and fortunate misunderstanding."

Jo Raquel Tejada of San Diego

She was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago on 5 September 1940. Her father, Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo, was a Bolivian aeronautical engineer from La Paz; her mother, Josephine Sarah Hall, had English ancestry going back to the Mayflower. The family moved to San Diego when she was two, and she was raised Presbyterian in a household her mother ran on Midwestern lines. A cousin on her father's side, Lidia Gueiler Tejada, became Bolivia's first female president.

She studied ballet from the age of seven and gave it up at seventeen when an instructor told her that her build would never suit a professional company — a verdict about her body delivered before she had any say in the matter, and a preview of the rest of her working life. She graduated with honours from La Jolla High School in 1958 and took a theatre arts scholarship to San Diego State College, collecting beauty titles along the way: Miss Photogenic, Miss Contour, Miss La Jolla, Miss San Diego, Maid of California.

The Weather Girl Who Went to Hollywood

She married her high-school boyfriend James Welch in 1959 and had two children with him. In 1960 she was reading the weather at KFMB-TV in San Diego. From there came modelling for Neiman Marcus in Dallas and waiting tables, and in 1963 the move to Los Angeles.

What happened next was a deliberate campaign. Her manager Patrick Curtis — later her second husband — set out to manufacture a sex symbol, and part of the plan was that she keep her ex-husband's Anglo surname rather than use Tejada, on the calculation that Hollywood in 1964 would file a Latina actress in a narrow drawer and leave her there. It was a cold-blooded reading of the industry, and it was correct.

*Fantastic Voyage* in 1966 put her in a submarine miniaturised inside a human body and made her a name. *One Million Years B.C.*, the same year, made her an icon.

Working Against the Image

The films that followed show someone trying to widen the aperture. She played Lust opposite Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in *Bedazzled* (1967), rode in *Bandolero!* with James Stewart and Dean Martin, and in *100 Rifles* (1969) played a love scene with the footballer Jim Brown that broke one of Hollywood's standing racial taboos. *Myra Breckinridge* (1970), from Gore Vidal's novel, cast her as a transgender woman and was meant to establish her as a serious actress; it became one of the notorious disasters of its decade. *Hannie Caulder* (1971) was a female-led Western that Quentin Tarantino would later draw on for *Kill Bill*. *Kansas City Bomber* (1972) put her in a roller derby, prompting *Life* to call her the hottest thing on wheels. Then, in 1973, *The Three Musketeers* won her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy — evidence, largely overlooked, that she had genuine comic timing.

Throughout it she refused to appear nude on screen or in magazines, and held that line for a career. Hugh Hefner, of all people, put it best: "Raquel Welch, one of the last of the classic sex symbols, came from the era when you could be considered the sexiest woman in the world without taking your clothes off."

The Lawsuit

In 1982 MGM fired her from *Cannery Row* a few weeks into production, claiming she had breached her contract by missing a make-up session, and replaced her with Debra Winger at lower pay. Welch sued for twenty million dollars. The evidence at trial showed the studio had decided to pin its budget problems on her. In 1986 a jury awarded her $10.8 million — reportedly more than the film itself earned.

She won and lost at the same time. The label "difficult" attached itself permanently, and the leading roles stopped. "I just wanted to clear my reputation," she said, "and get back to my work, my work in movies." The work did not come back in the same volume.

Reinvention

She went to Broadway instead. In December 1981 she covered for Lauren Bacall in *Woman of the Year* for two weeks, and the notices were strong enough that she returned for a six-month run in 1982; *Victor/Victoria* followed in 1997. She built a fitness and beauty franchise on the 1984 *Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program*, and a genuinely successful wig line, HAIRuWEAR. She turned up on *The Muppet Show*, *Mork & Mindy* and *Seinfeld*, and in 2002 played Aunt Dora in the PBS series *American Family* — the first time in a forty-year career that she had publicly worked as a Latina. The Imagen Foundation gave her a lifetime achievement award in 2001; MAC made her a Beauty Icon in 2007.

Why Raquel Is Called a Genius

Applied to Welch, the word cannot mean what it means for a physicist or a novelist, and pretending otherwise insults her. She was not a great actress. Her Golden Globe for *The Three Musketeers* is the only major acting prize on her shelf, most reviewers of her peak years wrote about her appearance rather than her performances, and *Myra Breckinridge* — her deliberate bid for artistic credibility — was a catastrophe. A *New York Times* critic called her "a marvellous breathing monument to womankind," which is admiration of a sort, and also a review of a body rather than of work.

What she had instead was strategic intelligence about her own image, sustained for half a century in an industry designed to take it from her. She understood, before almost anyone in her position, that the asset was the picture and that control of the picture was the whole game. She refused nudity when nudity was the price everyone else was paying, keeping the mystery — and the market — intact. She sued a studio that lied about her and won, at enormous cost to her employability, because the alternative was to accept the lie. She converted a poster into a fitness brand and a wig business that outlasted her film career. That is not artistic genius. It is a rarer thing in Hollywood: a woman who read the terms of her own exploitation accurately and negotiated them for fifty years.

Legacy

Welch died of cardiac arrest at her Los Angeles home on 15 February 2023, aged eighty-two, having also been suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She left more than seventy film and television credits, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame from 1996, and a single image so durable it hangs on the wall in *The Shawshank Redemption*. Her more substantial legacy is that she broke the blonde monopoly on American glamour, replacing the fifties bombshell with someone darker, sharper and demonstrably in charge. She spent a lifetime insisting the woman on the poster was a character she played. "Privately," she said, "I am understated and dislike any hoopla." Very few people believed her, which was rather the point.

Achievements

• Golden Globe Awards
• Worked as television actor, film actor and singer