Raquel Welch

[tigerrouge]

Vogue November 15, 1972 shot by Henry Clarke (same source

 

[tigerrouge]

Raquel talks about her book, Beyond The Cleavage (dailymail.co.uk

Raquel Welch has reigned as one of the world's most famous sex symbols ever since she emerged from behind a rock wearing a doeskin bikini in the 1966 film One Million Years B.C.

The poster took pride of place on the bedroom walls of millions of adolescent boys and made her a star. She went on to make more than 40 films, sharing the screen with leading men such as Frank Sinatra and, along the way, turning down unwelcome overtures from other famous names such as Elvis Presley and Richard Burton.

Earlier this month she celebrated her 70th birthday - incredibly, looking at least 30 years younger, with hardly a line on her face.

I have known her for most of her career and when we spoke this week, in spite of her reaching a landmark age that for a woman in Hollywood brings invisibility, she was as upbeat as ever.

'I've always wanted to be living proof that anyone can look and feel great at any age', she told me. 'I was given a magnificent body and I have looked after it well. I never felt I could afford the luxury of letting myself go. I made that choice a long time ago, so in a way, I set myself up.'

But she was always more than just a pretty face and a curvy body. She won a Golden Globe for her role in The Three Musketeers and she has earned more than £300 million from her businesses selling jewellery, cosmetics and wigs, which she frequently models herself.

She never adopted a cynical vulnerability, as Marilyn Monroe did. Nor tried to compete with Elizabeth Taylor for scorching magnetism. And she never tried to out-pout and pneumatically challenge earlier screen icon Jane Russell.

Instead, she got on with living up to her Hollywood poster line - 'The Body Beautiful' - in public while, behind the scenes, she wanted nothing more than the love and security of her own family. 'All those films, all that TV, all those public appearances', she says. 'Yet people saw a creation of their own minds and never once considered that I was just an ordinary human being.'

Another film, another skimpy outfit: Raquel with Ringo Starr in the 1969
film 'The Magic Christian'

​

As her birthday loomed, the intensely private Welch has emerged as an outspoken advocate for herself. Previously, she kept her silence. Now, she tells me: 'I ignore the milestones and focus on what fulfils me, not how I can fulfil other people's fantasies.'

She adds: 'I had always been a symbol, a thing, an image, somebody without a voice. Then, as I got older I began to feel it was important to express the real me, not be the person everyone only thinks they know. I never spoke out before because I believed that unless you have something insightful or interesting to say, keep your mouth shut. And even if you do, keep it shut anyway.'

She has launched her coming out, as she calls it, with a deeply personal memoir, Raquel: Beyond The Cleavage. 'I wanted to get past the ghost in the bikini. It's time for me to say things that I'd never have been allowed to say when I first started out.'

According to her, the truth about Hollywood in those days is that it was run by misogynists who regarded women as fodder for the box office. In fact, if our own Gemma Arterton, complaining this week that she's fed up working on films where she's seen as 'a piece of ***', thinks she's had it bad, one wonders how she'd have fared standing freezing on a rock in a bikini.

In Raquel's early days women weren't allowed to have brains, as her story of filming for One Million Years B.C. uncomfortably illustrates.

She had arrived in Tinsel Town in 1964 with her two children, Damon (born 1959) and daughter Tahnee (1961). Her five-year marriage to James Welch, her high school sweetheart, whom she met when they were both 15 and married in defiance of her bullying Bolivian-born father's wishes, had broken up.

She had only $200 (£150) in her purse, and finding somewhere to live was hard as landlords wouldn't rent to her because she had children. Amazingly, model agencies turned her down, but she landed a part in the dinosaur movie One Million Years B.C.

'I said to the producer: "A caveman epic? Who cares?"

He said: "It'll be a classic movie, Raquel."

'Well, he was right about that, but not in the way anyone realised. I hoped it would lead to something more. The studio promised it would - anyway, I had no choice. I was under contract and I had to do what I was told. I couldn't afford to be choosy.'

Then she had her first experience of Hollywood's attitude towards women. She tells in her book how, on the first day of filming One Million Years B.C., she went to the director, Don Chaffey, with her ideas for her scene. She told him she'd been reading the script and had been thinking…

'But he cut me short. "You were thinking?" he said, and there was no attempt to conceal the amazement in his voice. "Well, don't."

'And just in case I hadn't got the message, he spelt out exactly what he expected of me.

'"You see that rock over there? That's rock A. When I call action, you start running over to rock B, which is over there. When you get halfway between the two, pretend you see a giant turtle coming at you, and you scream. Then we break for lunch. Got it?"

'Yes, sir, I thought, I'll just do what I'm told and won't dare to use my brain.'

As for that iconic poster which was to launch her career as a worldwide sex object, the reality was rather different. 'I knew I wasn't that sexy woman in the picture. I might have looked it, but I didn't feel it. After all, what nobody was supposed to know was that I was divorced, the mother of two young children and alone in a man's world. Can you picture the girl in the poster with a baby in one arm and pushing a pushchair with the other? Kind of destroys the fantasy, doesn't it?'

The picture was taken at the top of a dormant volcano in Tenerife. 'It was snowing and everyone else wore heavy Parkas. Even the cameras had Parkas wrapped around them. But I was shivering in just my fur bikini.'

She gritted her teeth to stop them chattering. When she asked for a coat between takes, she was told, 'cave women never had them'.

She was convinced that the film would sink without trace, but several million copies of the poster had been distributed around the world, and she found herself an international pin-up.

She admits she had no idea that her life would change - 'it's been a blessing and a curse'. Growing up, she says she never considered herself pretty. 'Mainly because I didn't fit into the mould of blonde-blue-eyed ideal. But I rather liked being admired.'

When I first met her, I had expected her to be an Amazon, but she is just 5 ft 6 in tall. And she has always liked to see herself as 'an intelligent girl with artistic leanings'.

Even when she fell for her first husband and 'love distracted me from my studies' there was no question of her being intimate with him. 'I wasn't a Miss Goody Two-Shoes. None of the girls were "easy" back then. Most of us were virgins and I was no exception.'

Now, she says: 'I was caught between the hippies and flower children of the Sixties and the days of rock 'n' roll and hardline feminism. There was no place for me. I didn't fit in. A girl in a bikini didn't sit well with all that.'

However, the upside was that being a sex symbol empowered her. 'I didn't make a conscious decision to be very different to Monroe. If anything, I was the antidote. I was athletic, independent, strong, forceful, a sexual creature; somebody you had to deal with. I was never going to allow myself to be a pushover, and I think that came across in that first poster.'

Of course, being a sex goddess had its problems.

'But it was just not in me to have promiscuous dalliances for whatever reason. My children kept me grounded. I have always been the kind of woman who is only capable of falling in love. It's built into my DNA, and that's why I got married.'

With her new-found fame came the chance to mix with the biggest male stars of the day. But she is adamant that the casting couch played no part in her career. 'I never slept with anyone to get a part, although the offers were there. Just because I was a sex symbol didn't mean I was freely available. In fact, I have always regarded sex as over-rated if it is outside a proper loving relationship.'

She doesn't believe a woman should kiss and tell, she says, although 'Frank Sinatra was a gentleman and very protective of me when we made Lady In Cement'. Dean Martin, James Stewart and Burt Reynolds were 'very interesting in their own ways'.

Elvis Presley was 'full of high-octane energy, but he kept it suppressed inside a cool demeanour. He never actually seduced me, but he invited me to a place where I decided not to go. I didn't want to be just another notch in his gun.'

She draws a discreet veil over filming Bluebeard in Budapest with Richard Burton. 'He was like a heat-seeking missile, a smoking hot romantic, and just so charismatic.'

The actress with fourth husband Richard Palmer: They separated last
March after 11 years

​

She married three more times after James Welch - director and producer Patrick Curtis (1967-62), French director Andre Weinfeld (1980-90) and Beverly Hills restaurateur Richard Palmer, 15 years her junior, from whom she separated last March after 11 years.

'All the men I have fallen for have made me feel that I'm a person in my own right and they're not with me because they see some kind of kudos in going to bed with Raquel Welch.'

And the lesson for every woman is to stop being scared of getting older, she says, because reaching a milestone age should be seen as opening another chapter in life. 'It's not time to give up - it's time to enjoy what you have. Do what I do, which is to think of ageing gracefully as a game. Just as you maintain your home, your car, your garden, you should look after your greatest gift: your body.'

She lost her own fear of getting older thanks to her mother, who died last year aged 93. 'I saw how she was coping with life as she aged. It was as if she was paving the way for me. It's a natural progression, of course, but we all try to resist it. All my life, it's been my job to look like Raquel Welch. That's what I do for a living. And I'll do it for as long as I can, otherwise I'm out of work.'

She says that if her son, a computer consultant, and daughter, a talented actress, would give her grandchildren she'd be 'complete'. 'That's an ambition of mine only they can fulfil. They're still my great joy.'

This year there has been one major change in her life. After the break-up of her last marriage, she decided to move out of her large mansion in Beverly Hills and downsize.

It had been filled with Warhol-style portraits of her and the memorabilia of her 40-year career. The fur bikini has been mothballed.
​

​

​

​

​

 

[lady stardust]

ebay.com

 

[lady stardust]

ebay.com

 

[lady stardust]

ebay.com

 

[lady stardust]

ebay.com

 

[lady stardust]

hothothot..

ebay.com

 

[tigerrouge]

At the Women in Film Chicago 2010 Focus Awards, where she received a lifetime achievement award (dailymail.co.uk

 

[tigerrouge]

French Elle (ebay.com/fredericd3000

?? March 1982 / No 1887
?? October 1985 / No 2077

 

[RoseMary]

Raquel Welch 32nd Anniversary Carousel Of Hope Gala in Beverly Hills October 23, 2010 (tlfan.to).

 

[anniehall]

Raquel Welch by Avedon

CiaoVogue

 

[Echoes]

Beverly Hilton Saturday, April 9, 2011; John Wayne Cancer Institute's 26th Odyssey Ball

http://www.dailymail.co.uk




Not bad for 70 years old.

 

[Mirik]

Harper's Bazaar Mexico Marzo 2011 ebook30

 

[tigerrouge]

Out walking in the Hollywood Hills with her prsonal trainer (dailymail.co.uk

 

[chloesaab]

L'Officiel Paris 1976

jalougallery

 

[Miss Retro]

Gorgeous woman. Thanks everyone for sharing.

 

[Miss Retro]

Some more pics, I hope you all like

Ebay

 

[Miss Retro]

Ebay

 

[Libra Skye18]

Happy Birthday, Raquel!

mskittycollins.tumblr​

 

[justaguy]

US Vogue November 1975
Blackglama
Photo Bill King
Model Raquel Welch


vogue archive