Enduring Hollywood icon Welch was sex symbol of ’60s
Raquel Welch, the voluptuous movie actress who became the 1960s’ first major American sex symbol and maintained that image for a half-century in show business, died Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 82.
Welch’s Hollywood success began as much with a poster as with the film it publicized. Starring in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966) as a Pleistocene-era cave woman, she posed in a rocky prehistoric landscape, wearing a tattered doeskin bikini, and grabbed the spotlight with her defiant pose and dancer’s body. She was 26.
It had been three years since Marilyn Monroe’s death, and the industry needed a goddess.
When Playboy in 1998 named the 100 sexiest female stars of the 20th century, Welch came in third, right after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Brigitte Bardot was fourth.
The critics were often unkind. Throughout her career, Welch was publicly admired more for her anatomy than for her acting ability. She even called her 2010 memoir “Beyond the Cleavage.”
Despite a career based largely on sex appeal, Welch repeatedly refused to appear nude onscreen. “Personally, I always hated feeling so exposed and vulnerable” in love scenes, she wrote in her memoir.
After graduating from La Jolla High School in San Diego, where her nickname was Rocky, she received a scholarship — thanks to success in local beauty pageants — to study theater at San Diego State College. But she dropped out at 19 to marry her high school boyfriend, James Wesley Welch. Because of her local celebrity, she landed a job as the “weather girl” on KFMB, a San Diego television station.
The birth of her two children complicated her career plans, but she soon left her husband and moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.
It was not long before she had a contract with a major studio, 20th Century Fox. She was cast in “Fantastic Voyage” (1966), then “One Million Years B.C.”
She appeared in some two dozen films over the next decade, perhaps most notably “Myra Breckinridge” (1970), in which she played a glamorous transgender woman, and “The Last of Sheila” (1973), a semi-campy murder mystery with a luxury-yacht setting and a script by Stephen Sondheim.