Raquel Welch

Background

Raquel Welch dominated the movie industry from the 1960s to the 1980s. Her dazzling beauty and superb acting skills dazzled millions. Welch was born on September 5, 1940, in Illinois, Chicago, and her zodiac sign is Virgo. Her parents are Armando Carlos Tejada and Josephine Sarah Hall. She has an American mother with English ancestry and a Bolivian father. Her parents moved from Chicago to San Diego when she was two years old. Welch always loved performing and entertaining, and that was why she started learning ballet at age seven.

In school, she was a cheerleader, and she won beauty pageants in her teens. She graduated high school as an honors student and got into San Diego State with a scholarship. She married her high school sweetheart, James Welch, in 1959, and gave birth to their first child in the same year. After that, she started to feature in local theater productions.

She met her future husband, Hollywood agent Patrick Curtis in 1963, and together, they hatched a plan to build Welch into a Hollywood sex icon. When Welch started acting, there was prejudice towards Hispanics in Hollywood. Curtis advised Welch to continue to use her former husband’s name as it wasn’t a Hispanic name. She started acting in movies in 1964, but “Fantastic Voyage” made her a star. In the same year, she appeared in Hammer Studio’s “One Million B.C.” in an animal-skin bikini. “One Million B.C.” finally crowned Welch as a Hollywood sex icon. Pictures of her in that bikini were made into posters, and she became a known face worldwide. In 1968, she worked with Frank Sinatra in “The Lady in Cement.” Her performances in movies and her beauty made “Playboy” magazine dub her “The most desired woman of the 1970s.”