“I am living proof that a picture speaks a thousand words,” she once said. And these old Raquel Welch photos clearly illustrate what she meant.
Actress Raquel Welch, who was born Jo-Raquel Tejada in Chicago in 1940 to a Bolivian father and an American mother, never dreamed of becoming a movie star or a Hot icon. Ballet was actually her first love.
She put her everything to her ballet training from the age of seven to 17, only to be devastated when her teacher claimed that she did not have the physique for it.
However, Welch would eventually become best renowned for her physique. She is considered to be one of the most enduring Hot symbols ever thanks to the image of her in a fur bikini from her 1966 breakthrough movie One Million Years B.C. She even beat out Marilyn Monroe for the second spot on a 2013 Men’s Health list of the “hottest women of all time.”
The New York Times referred to this Golden Globe-winning actress as “a marvelous breathing monument to womankind,” but she was never your ordinary starlet.
Raquel Welch stated in her 2010 book, Beyond the Cleavage, “I broke the mold of the soft blonde queen of the boudoir.”
She argued, however, that the fact that she was a pioneering female action heroine was the reason her image had such an impact. Similar to a female Clint Eastwood, but sans the six-shooter and cigar. This is undeniably on exhibit in her well-known action movies, such as Bandolero! from 1968, 100 Rifles from 1969, and Hannie Caulder from 1971 (which served as an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s KiII Bill).
She was also a busy single mother of two children from her first marriage, which had ended in 1964, while she was kicking asses and igniting hearts onscreen. She would attempt to find true love three more times. She turned out to be too free-spirited for marriage, though.
Three years after her fourth divorce, she declared in 2011, “I am just not suited for it any longer.” I enjoy the company of guys and their company, but I am too self-reliant and driven.
With Dudley Moore in Bedazzled. 1967
Raquel Welch on the set of Bandolero! in 1968.
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In Spanish Square, Rome in 1966.
