Background

Raquel Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada on September 5, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois, United States to the family of an aeronautical engineer Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo and Josephine Sarah Hall. Her father was only Bolivian via nationality but his ethnicity was Spaniard, from a long lineage of Europeans from Spain. Her mother was an American of English descent. Is the 21st great-granddaughter of King Edward I. She has a younger brother, James Castillo Tejada, and a younger sister, Gayle Carole Tejada, a nature preserver. While Welch was still a toddler her family moved to La Jolla, California, outside of San Diego, where her father worked as a General Dynamics Corporation engineer. She started winning local pageants including the title of Miss Photogenic and Miss Contour at the age of 14. While attending school she was crowned Miss Fairest of the Fair in the San Diego County Fair.

Education

Raquel Welch attended and subsequently graduated from La Jolla High School in California in 1958. As a young girl, Welch wanted to perform. She studied ballet from age seven to seventeen but gave it up after her instructor told her that she didn't have the right figure. With her sights set on theater arts, she studied at San Diego State College on a scholarship in drama starting in 1958. Off-campus Welch became a weather forecaster at KFMB, a local San Diego television station, and eventually quit college.

Career

After working in Dallas, Taxes, as a waitress and model, Raquel Welch relocated to Hollywood in 1963; within three days, she had already landed a manager, Patrick Curtis, and soon they formed a promotions company, Curtwell Enterprises. After appearing in Life magazine in a revealing bikini, she began working on the American Broadcasting Company series Hollywood Palace, and in 1964 made her feature debut with an unbilled appearance in the Elvis Presley vehicle Roustabout.

Welch next appeared as a prostitute in 1964's A House Is Not a Home, followed by another uncredited appearance a year later in Do Not Disturb. In 1965, she scored her first lead role in the pop musical A Swingin' Summer, resulting in a contract with 20th Century Fox, which cast her in the sci-fi hit Fantastic Voyage before loaning her to the British horror studio Hammer. There she starred in a 1967 remake of One Million Years B.C.; clad in little more than strategically placed strips of fur, Welch's publicity stills appeared everywhere, and she became a major sex symbol - still, few went to actually see the movie itself. Despite the publicity, Fox was clearly wary of her talents, and did not ask her to return to Hollywood; instead, she remained in Europe, starring with Edward G. Robinson and Vittorio de Sica in 1968's The Biggest Bundle of Them All and with Monica Vitti and Claudia Cardinale in Le Fate. While in Paris, Welch and manager Curtis married, issuing a series of provocative wedding night publicity photos.

After appearing as Lust incarnate in Stanley Donen's seven-deadly-sins comedy Bedazzled, Welch finally returned to the United States Fox used her judiciously in pictures like the 1968 James Stewart Western Bandolero! and the Frank Sinatra mystery Lady in Cement. Following in 1969 was 100 Rifles, a controversial Western which paired Welch with Jim Brown, and a year later she earned her first real starring role in the disastrous Myra Breckenridge. Her situation was unusual; she was certainly a star and a household name, yet few people ever went to see her movies - neither 1971's Hannie Caulder nor the following year's Fuzz did anything to alter the dilemma, and when the 1973 roller-derby melodrama Kansas City Bomber also tanked at the box office, Welch divorced Curtis and returned to Europe to appear in Bluebeard. While both 1973's The Three Musketeers and its sequel The Four Musketeers were well received, she earned little credit for their success, and when the 1976 black comedy Mother, Jugs and Speed failed, Hollywood largely washed their hands of her.

Welch instead turned to nightclubs, concert stages, and television; she also continued making films in Europe, including 1977's The Prince and the Pauper and L'Animal, co-starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1980, she was tapped to star in Cannery Row, but was fired a month into production; she filed suit against MGM for damages and was awarded 11 million dollars. Welch spent the entirety of the 1980s away from theaters, focusing primarily on television productions like 1982's The Legend of Walks Far Woman and 1987's Right to Die, in which she delivered one of her strongest performances as a woman suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. After an absence of over a decade, in 1994 Welch returned to cinema in the comedy The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. Throughout the decade, she also made a number of infomercials and exercise videos, and in 1995 also starred in the short-lived nighttime soap opera CPW. In 1997, she took over for Julie Andrews in the troubled Broadway musical Victor/Victoria, which closed less than a month after Welch's debut performance. In the years to come, Welch would remain active on screen, playing Aunt Dora on the massively popular sitcom American Family.

Welch played a role in the TV film The Legend of Walks Far Woman that aired on National Broadcasting Company, alongside Bradford Dillman. She has also made notable contributions to television in films like Right to Die, Scandal in a Small Town, and Torch Song. Her recent ventures include ‘How to Be a Latin Lover’. The film released in April 2017 and it was a success.

Achievements

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  Raquel Welch was one of the most popular celebrities of the 1960s and 1970s. Nearly universally known as a star, Welch has had few actual hits over her film career. Nevertheless, she has proven a durable figure in the ever-changing Hollywood scene and has carved out a niche for herself beyond the one afforded her by her natural allure.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage

    (In Beyond the Cleavage, Raquel Welch talks, woman to woma...)

    2010
  • Raquel: The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program

    (An easy-to-follow health and exercise program, based on t...)

    1984

• movie

  • The Oldest Profession

    (Six of Europe's finest directors trace the evolution of p...)

    1967
  • Bandolero!

    (A man disguises himself as an executioner to save his bro...)

    1968
  • Fantastic Voyage

    (In this legendary science fiction adventure, a surgical t...)

    1966
  • The Three Musketeers

    (A mixture of comedy and adventure based on the Alexander ...)

    1974
  • 100 Rifles

    (A Bank robber and a lawman join up with a female revoluti...)

    1969
  • Shoot Loud, Louder...I Don't Understand! 1966
  • Bedazzled 1967
  • Lady in Cement 1968
  • Hannie Caulder 1971
  • Mother, Jugs & Speed 1976

Religion

Raquel Welch was raised in the Presbyterian religion and continues to go to church every Sunday.

Politics

Welch described herself as being rather on the conservative side of the political agenda.

Views

Even though she doesn't speak much Spanish, Raquel Welch considers that her Latino background is indeed part of who she is.

Quotations: "Once you get rid of the idea that you must please other people before you please yourself, and you begin to follow your own instincts - only then can you be successful. You become more satisfied, and when you are, other people will tend to be satisfied by what you do."

"Being a sex symbol was rather like being a convict. The mind is an erogenous zone."

"I've always personally been color blind. Growing up, I thought Lena Horne was amazing, and Diahann Carroll was amazing, and I absolutely fell in love with Sidney Poitier. Whether they were black or white or whatever, it wasn't a big thing for me. When I was doing 100 Rifles (1969) and I found out I'd be working with Jim Brown, I was more concerned with whether he could act, because he was primarily known as a football player. But he was great."

"I still call myself an actress. I'm not an actor. I'm not a guy."

Personality

Raquel Welch's IQ was once measured at 140, but scholarly pursuits were not on her mind.

Interests

• dancing

• Music & Bands

  Lena Horne

Connections

After graduating from school in 1958, Jo Raquel Tejada got pregnant and married her high school sweetheart James Welch a year later, on 8th May 1959. She gave birth to their first child, Damon Welch. The couple had another child, a daughter named Latanne Welch in 1961. The couple separated in 1962 and divorced in 1964 due to unknown reasons and differences. In a number of interviews, Welch has expressed her regret for running hastily from her marriage to James Welch and that she should have tried harder to make the marriage work. She has often said that James Welch was the best of her four husbands.

In 1966, Welch married producer Patrick Curtis. The couple divorced in 1972. In later interviews, she has described Curtis as a svengal and has described their relationship as unhappy, in which she felt extremely manipulated.

Welch's third marriage was to the French-American television producer and journalist André Weinfeld. They met in 1977 and got married in 1980. They were married for 10 years before separating in 1990.

In 1997, Welch met Los Angeles-based restaurateur Richard Palmer, who was then engaged, but later left his fiancée to pursue Welch. Fifteen years her junior, Palmer married Welch in 1999. The pair separated in 2008. Welch has expressed her intentions to not marry again and that she can live without a man.

Father:

Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo

Mother:

Josephine Sarah Hall

Son:

Damon James Welch

Daughter:

Latanne Rene "Tahnee" Welch

Cousin:

Lidia Gueiler

ancestor:

Edward I, King of England

Brother:

James Castillo Tejada

Sister:

Gayle Carole Tejada

Ex-husband:

James Welch

Ex-husband:

Patrick Curtis

Ex-husband:

André Weinfeld

Ex-husband:

Richard Palmer

colleague:

Christopher Lee

colleague:

Richard Burton

References

• Raquel Welch: Sex Symbol to Superstar
  1985
• Raquel Welch: The Shocking Truth!
  2020
• Raquel Welch
  1985
• Cinema Sex Sirens
  2011