Saturdays with the Stars: Raquel Welch

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Ann-Margret, a red-headed glamour girl who became "the kitten with a whip" in the 1960's in the post-Marilyn era of sex in Hollywood.  This month we enter our final installment of our look at the sex symbols of the 1930's-70's.  We could have kept going, but at this point in Hollywood it feels like there's a divergence, with sex symbols either enjoying just 1-2 pictures of success (someone like a Bo Derek or Megan Fox) or instead enjoying success in a different medium like television (Farrah Fawcett, Pamela Anderson), modeling (Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford), or pop music (Madonna, Britney Spears).  So to close out our series we're going to look at one of the final, iconic sex symbols of the 1960's and 70's, a woman whose bikini-clad look was so legendary that she was incorporated alongside Rita Hayworth & Marilyn Monroe in The Shawshank Redemption.  This month, our star is Raquel Welch.

Born Jo Raquel Tejada, she was the daughter of a prominent Bolivian family on her father's side (her cousin Lidia Gueller Tejada was the President of Bolivia in the early-1980's), and on her mother's side she descended from a well-to-do Chicago family.  Like many aspiring actresses, she went through a cavalcade of "cliched" jobs early in her career, from weather forecaster to model to waitress, until she eventually moved to Los Angeles and got small parts in movies, most notably Roustabout opposite Elvis Presley.  A chance appearance in Life magazine caught the attention of super-producer Saul David, who signed her to a contract, where she soon was the lead in Fantastic Voyage, a major earner in 1966, and one that translated her from anonymous girl in a photo spread to a household name.

Welch's career is about as prototypical as you can get for a sex symbol in our series, which has oftentimes been about how women whose faces (and other attributes) we'd recognize in a heartbeat star in films that we'd struggle to name.  Welch made a number of movies in the 1960's & 70's, very much a leading lady and signature star of the era, but none of them are particularly well-remembered.  Her most known image is in "the first bikini" in One Million Years BC, but this isn't really a film that has captured a spot in cinephile culture-it's only known for that one shot of Welch in a bikini.  Despite starring with actors of note during the era like Frank Sinatra, Burt Reynolds, Richard Burton, & Jimmy Stewart, she never really appeared in a movie of note, not even one like Gilda or Some Like It Hot like some of her predecessor "sex symbols/actresses."  About the closest she ever came was 1974's The Three Musketeers, where she actually won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical (beating the likes of Diahann Carroll & Helen Hayes), but this never turned into a new chapter as a more seriously-considered actress, and Welch by the end of the decade had started to earn more fame for her on-set feuds with actors like Mae West & Jim Brown than for her film roles.

Welch's career came to a screeching halt in 1982, when MGM fired her from the set of Cannery Row, and she sued the studio for breach of contract.  The court case went on for years, during which time Welch didn't work in film, and in fact she made no pictures throughout the entire 1980's, though she did get a Golden Globe nomination for the TV movie Right to Die.  Welch won that suit, taking $10 million with her, but her film career never recovered, and she became more known for her seemingly ageless beauty than for her acting roles (which tended to spoof her public persona as a gorgeous diva).  This month, we will once again try to unmask the cinematic output of the actress underneath the sex symbol packaging, and will take an examination into the film career of Raquel Welch.