"Americans have always had sex symbols. It's a time-honored tradition and I'm flattered to have been one. But it's hard to have a long, fruitful career once you've been stereotyped that way. That's why I'm proud to say I've endured."
- Raquel Welch

That Raquel Welch has endured at all is a testament to her tenacity and the talents too often over-shadowed in her youth by her reputation as the last of the great Hollywood sex symbols. She was born Raquel Tejada in Chicago, the daughter of a Bolivian engineer and an American woman. The family relocated to La Jolla, Calif., while she was still a child. By the time she was 14, the fast-developing young girl had won her first beauty contest, Miss Photogenic, a title she still deserves. After a few small film roles, she met former child actor Patrick Curtis (he had played Olivia de Havilland's son as an infant in Gone With the Wind, 1939), and they set out to make her a star. Through carefully planned film roles and publicity they achieved their goal, particularly when a poster of Welch in a fur bikini for her role as Loana of the Shell People in One Million Years, B.C. (1966) became an international best seller in 1967. The special effects enhanced tale of cave dwellers fighting off prehistoric monsters (skillfully animated by Ray Harryhausen) sold tickets, too.

Eventually, however, the sex-star days had to end, prompted by the disastrous box-office performance of Myra Breckinridge (1970), one of the worst movies ever made. In response, Welch successfully repackaged herself, poking fun at her image in films like The Three Musketeers (1973), which brought her a Golden Globe in 1974, then honing her musical talents for a series of successful nightclub engagements and a Broadway turn replacing Lauren Bacall in Woman of the Year. In the late '80s, Welch showed off her dramatic talents in a series of well-received television films, including Right to Die (1987), in which she played a woman suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease. More recently, she has reached back to her Latino roots for acclaimed performances in the independent feature Tortilla Soup (2001) and the PBS series American Family (2002).

by Frank Miller