Raquel Welch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008) |
| Raquel Welch | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Welch at the premiere of Bette Midler's movie, The Rose, 1979 |
|||||||
| Born | Jo Raquel Tejada September 5, 1940 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
||||||
| Spouse(s) | James Westley Welch (1959–1964) Patrick Curtis (1967–1972) Andre Weinfeld (1980–1990) Richard Palmer (1999–present) |
||||||
|
|||||||
Raquel Welch (born September 5, 1940) is a Golden Globe-winning American actress who achieved fame as a Hollywood sex symbol during the 1960s.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois, the oldest of three children and the daughter of Josephine Sarah (née Hall) and Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo.[1] Her father immigrated from La Paz, Bolivia, her mother was an Irish-American.[2]
In 1942, Armando Tejada was transferred to San Diego, California. The family moved to the suburb of La Jolla, where Welch grew up. She took dancing lessons as a child, and was winning beauty pageants by the time she was a teenager. Among her titles were "Miss Photogenic," "Miss La Jolla," "Miss Contour," and "Miss San Diego." In 1957, she was named "Miss Fairest of the Fair" at the San Diego County Fair, and won the Maid of California 1957 title as well. After attending La Jolla High School (Class of 1958), she entered San Diego State College on a theater arts scholarship. The following year she married a high school sweetheart, James Welch.
[edit] Career
In 1959, Welch played the title role in the famous Ramona Pageant, a yearly outdoor play at Hemet, California, which is based on the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson.
She became a weather forecaster at KFMB, a local San Diego television station. Because of her heavy schedule, she decided to leave college. Her marriage broke up and she moved with her two children, Damon and Latanne, to Dallas, Texas, where she modeled for Neiman Marcus and worked as a cocktail hostess, intending to move on to New York City from there.
Instead, Welch moved back to California. She found a place in Los Angeles and started making the rounds of the movie studios. She was cast in bit parts in two films and in the television shows Bewitched, McHale's Navy and The Virginian, as well as on the weekly variety series The Hollywood Palace as a billboard girl and presenter of acts.
Welch's first featured role came in the beach film A Swingin' Summer, which led to a contract with 20th Century Fox. She was subsequently cast in a leading role in the sci-fi hit Fantastic Voyage (1966), which made her a star. She was the last star created under the studio system.
On loan out to Hammer Studios in Britain, Welch starred in the remake of One Million Years B.C. striking an iconic pose in a prehistoric animal-skin bikini. After her appearance as lust incarnate in the hit Bedazzled, she returned to the U.S. and appeared in the Western film Bandolero!, with <a href="/wiki/James_S