Celebrity Biographies
Raquel welch
His name is synonymous with exuberance. Raquel Welch may not be the best actress to have graced the screens, but she has undoubtedly been one of the most beautiful, no matter how much beauty standards have changed. Nicknamed ‘the body’ – long before the same name was applied to Elle MacPherson – it was inevitable that she would be given roles based on her physique, but it is fair to admit that she also defends herself by acting. What more could you want? Interestingly, she succeeded in the first place in the fantastic genre.
Born on September 5, 1940, in Chicago (Illinois), Jo Raquel Tejada was the first of three children of a Bolivian engineer and an American. Soon the family moved to San Diego (California), where her father was stationed, and there, little Raquel took dance lessons and soon began to win beauty pageants for teenagers. When she graduated from San Diego State College at the age of 18, she married her high school sweetheart, James Welch, from whom she would take her stage name, and with whom she had two children. In addition, she became a weather woman on local San Diego television.
After divorcing her husband, Raquel Welch began to work as a model, almost always in bikinis or underwear. She soon made her film debut with very brief roles inA House is Not a Home – with Shelley Winters – and Roustabout , starring Elvis Presley . These roles came to her thanks to her manager, Patrick Curtis, with whom she would join from 1967 -later she has also been romantically linked to director and producer André Weinfeld and businessman Richard Palmer-. In her early days, she appeared in episodes ofThe Virginian , Bewitched and other television series. Her big moment came in 1966, as she first starred inAmazing Journey , where she was a surgical assistant reduced to the size of a bacterium with three men, in order to enter the body of a Soviet scientist to destroy the thrombosis that is about to kill him. The same year, Raquel Welch also swept the box office dressed as a prehistoric woman in another little classic of fantastic cinema,A million years ago , a film that established him as a star.
From that moment on, Raquel Welch maintained her stardom throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, with films as diverse as the Italian comedyShoot louder, louder… I don’t understand it , with Marcello Mastroianni , the French episodic film The Oldest Job in the World , the westernBandolero , the comedy Bedazzled , the adventure filmBeautiful, intrepid and spy , the intrigue tapeThe cement woman , the drama of intrigueBluebeard , the action filmThe Animal , an adaptation ofThe Prince and the Pauper (1977) and even played Constance, d’Artagnan’s girlfriend, inThe Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequels, The Return of the Musketeers andThe four musketeers . His films rarely crashed at the box office, although there were interesting cases such asWild Party , by James Ivory . At the end of the 70s he left the cinema, after a series of projects that went to waste, although he continued to perform plays and television productions. He has returned to the big screen, occasionally, to play small roles in films likeLegally blonde and Tortilla Soup .