Raquel Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada on September 5, 1940. Her father was a Bolivian engineer, while her mother was of English ancestry.
Welch comes from a family with great traditions: her grandfather was a well-known architect, and her cousin, Lidia Guelier Tejada, made history as Bolivia’s first female president, serving from 1979 to 1980.
Welch concentrated on her ballet training at an early age, but her coach warned her that she didn’t have the ‘proper figure’ to succeed.
But Welch was successful on another level: she won numerous beauty pageants. At the age of 14, she began her career as a beauty queen and eventually became Miss San Diego.
‘I was terrible at coping with reality… I wanted to be Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, all the beautiful ladies who were dragged away by great men on their enormous white horses.
That is not unusual; many children grow up in this manner. But I knew it was going to happen.’
She married her high school lover, James Welch, at the age of 18. They had two children before divorcing in 1961.
But her life there did not go as planned. Welch was fighting to make ends meet, but she wasn’t about to give up.
Her dream of becoming a movie star did not come true, and she moved to Hollywood in 1963.
There, she met and fell in love with press agent Patrick Curtis. He later married her and became her manager.The interaction with Curtis had a significant impact on Welch’s destiny.
To begin, he took his wife on a press tour across Europe, showcasing her primary features – a curvy figure and a seductive face.
The overall result was astonishing: Welch rocketed to celebrity despite never having written or directed a single film.
Curtis then made certain that his wife appeared in a number of films, including Elvis Presley’s Roustabout (1964).
The audience had been watching Welch for a year after she made a tremendous impression as a cave girl in One Million Years B.C.
’I had made another movie (Fantastic Voyage), which was a significant step forward for me,’ she told the Sunday Post in 2018. ‘I was the dinosaur lady first and the science person second,’ Welch explained.
Welch’s iconic performance as a cave girl in One Million Years B.C. had only three lines, but few remember them. Instead, her fur bikini became iconic, a true pop culture figure.
‘Aside from that one stupid bit of speech, ‘Me Loana…,’ I had no other credentials as an actress.’ Tumak, you.’
I felt as if I’d stepped into a booby trap (pun intended). ‘I’m live proof that a picture is worth a thousand words,’ Welch explained.
Men’s Health ranked her second among the Hottest Women of All Time in 2013. Jennifer Aniston was the only person to beat Welch.
She met several men and married four times.
Unfortunately, none of her relationships were long-lasting. Last year, she told Piers Morgan about her marriages:
‘I felt feelings for all of those guys.’
‘At the time, I thought I was in love and that we might have a wonderful life together, but it wasn’t meant to be.’