RAQUEL WELCH
(5 September 1940 - 15 February 2023)
The American actress Raquel Welch, who has died aged 82, always wanted an acting career, but was initially seen as a sex symbol. In her first films she was basically eye candy, playing a call girl in A House is Not a Home and a college girl in the Elvis Presley Roustabout (both 1964). She also did some TV work before her first major role in the teen comedy A Swingin’ Summer in 1965. Then she was discovered by 20th Century-Fox who put her under contract. For Raquel the rest was movie history.
Raquel Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago to Armando Tejada, a Bolivian aeronautical engineer, and his wife Josephina, of English parentage, the daughter of an architect. The family moved to California when Raquel was two. At age seven she took dance classes but was not the right shape for classical ballet. Instead, she successfully entered beauty contests. After graduation, she married her high school boyfriend, had two children and became a TV weather girl. Separated from her husband, she modelled for the retail giant Neiman Marcus and worked as a waitress.
In LA, she approached film studios, acquired a manager and got a seven-year contract with Fox. Her first (uncredited) part was in the Doris Day comedy Do Not Disturb but then came Fantastic Voyage (1966), Richard Fleischer’s sci-fi drama in which a submarine crew is miniaturized and injected into the body of a brain-damaged scientist. It was pure hokum but with imaginative designs and a tiny Raquel Welch swimming around, the film won Oscars for best art direction and best special effects. After a couple of Italian films, Welch was loaned to Hammer for One Million Years BC, famous for no dialogue, just grunts. Welch wore a fetching fur bikini in this tale of prehistoric man and his dinosaur mates.
Back at Fox she was a sky diver in Fathom, deadly sin Lust in Bedazzled with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and a widow in Bandolero! with James Stewart and Dean Martin. More bikinis for Welch in The Biggest Bundle of Them All, Ken Annakin’s crime drama with Robert Wagner. With Frank Sinatra she did Lady in Cement and with Jim Brown and Burt Reynolds she was in Tom Gries’ Western 100 Rifles. For The Magic Christian she was the Priestess of the Whip with Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, in Terry Christian's satire. In 1970 Mike Sarne made a dire version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge in which Welch shared the title role with Rex Reed, with Mae West, John Huston and Farrah Fawcett in support.
Another Western provided her with the title role in Hannie Caulder, then came the action-comedy Fuzz, with Burt Reynolds, the sports drama Kansas City Bomber, the mystery of Bluebeard with Richard Burton, and The Last of Sheila, a starry whodunnit (written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins). The part of Constance Bonacieux in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers won her a Golden Globe and she repeated the role in The Four Musketeers. The Wild Party was James Ivory’s film about a Hollywood scandal with Welch as a film star’s mistress. Mother, Jugs & Speed, Peter Yates’s comedy, had Bill Cosby as Mother and Harvey Keitel as Speed, so guess who played Jugs and why?
Then, after The Prince and the Pauper (as Lady Edith) and L'Animal (aka Stuntwoman), a French action-comedy with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Welch took a break by settling into TV. Back in the cinema she played Mrs Windham Vandermark in Legally Blonde (2001) with Reese Witherspoon, Forget About It (2006) with Burt Reynolds, and How To Be a Latin Lover with Salma Hayak, her last film (in 2017). Raquel Welch also did some stage work, taking over from Lauren Bacall in Woman of the Year, a Kander and Ebb musical based on the Hepburn-Tracy film of 1942. She also played Epifania in Shaw’s The Millionairess (1995) and the leading role(s) in the Mancini-Bricusse musical Victor/Victoria.
Raquel married her high school crush James Welch in 1959 and they have two children, Damon and Tahnee. After their divorce, she married the producer-agent Patrick Curtis from 1967 to 1972. She also wed the director André Weinfeld and the pizzeria owner Richie Palmer. She dated and had relationships with other actors, including the Spanish stars Sancho Gracia and Aldo Sambrell.
MICHAEL DARVELL