She is considered one of the world’s greatest beauties ever, a Hollywood icon and a sex symbol of her generation in the ‘60s.
It’s hard to believe it, but Raquel Welch has turned 82 years old.
There are beautiful women, and then…there’s Raquel Welch. Positively in a league of her own.
The legendary actress and icon was born in 1940 on September 5th, as Jo Raquel Tejada. Her father was a Bolivian-born engineer, and her mother was of English descent.
Welch came from a family with proud traditions – her grandfather was a famous architect and her cousin, Lidia Guelier Tejada, wrote history when she became the first female president of Bolivia, serving from 1979 to 1980.
Even though Raquel doesn’t speak Spanish, she’s very proud of her Hispanic heritage. Few people knew about her Latino background, which got overlooked when she took her first husband’s last name and became known as Raquel Welch.
”I think language is very important to your identity and not having that … I sometimes feel isolated from that part of me,” Welch said in 2015 and continued:
”Yet I still feel very, very Hispanic. The essence of who I am is a Latina.”
At a young age, Welch focused on her ballet training, but she was told by her coach that she didn’t have the ”right figure” to succeed.
But Welch was successful on another level – she won a lot of beauty contests. She began her career as a beauty queen at the age of 14 and later became Miss San Diego.
“I was happiest in fantasy,” she told Rolling Stone in 1974.
“I wasn’t good at dealing with reality… I wanted a storybook life, to be Rapunzel and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, all the beautiful ladies that wonderful men came along on their big white horses and dragged away. Which is not remarkable, a lot of kids grow up that way. But I decided it was gonna happen. ”
At age 18, she married her high school sweetheart, James Welch. The couple had two children but divorced in 1961.
After the breakup, Welch moved to Texas with her two young children, Damon (born 1959) and Tahnee (born 1961).
But life there didn’t turn out as she had hoped. She was struggling to make ends meet, but Welch wasn’t going to give up.
Frank Sinatra and Raquel Welch from the motion picture Lady in Cement.
Her dream and ambition of becoming a movie star was still there and in 1963, she relocated to Hollywood. There she met press agent Patrick Curtis and fell in love. He later became both her manager and husband.
Meeting Curtis had a very big impact on Welch’s future. To begin with, he took his wife on a publicity tour in Europe, where he promoted her main assets – a curvy figure and a sensual face.
The result was quite astonishing – without having made a single movie, Welch suddenly became something of a star. Curtis then made sure that his wife got some smaller roles in several film, including Elvis Presley’s film Roustabout (1964).
Two years later, Welch’s breakthrough came when she landed a role in the American science fiction film Fantastic Voyage (1966).
The audience already had their eyes on Welch a year before, when she made a big impression as a cave girl in One Million Years B.C.
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