Raquel Welch, A Sex Symbol On Her Own Terms

I only met Raquel Welch once, and on that occasion it wasn’t really me she was interested in speaking with.

The year was 1995, the occasion was the opening night of the New York Film Festival. Welch was very taken with the Thierry Mugler black “Bondage dress” worn by my date, Octavia. It was something she hadn’t seen before, and she showered Octavia with compliments on how well she wore it. The two compared notes on fashion for a while — I puttered off to get them drinks while they chatted like old pals. As it happens, Octavia is a transgender woman, and in 1995 trans people, even in New York, tended to be othered and exoticized to a different extent than they are today. Welch, looking pretty good in a floor-length black gown herself, merely recognized my friend’s fabulousness and addressed her as a kind of peer. 

I was, of course, awed to see the quintessential movie sex symbol of my generation in the flesh, although I was also a slightly staggered at how, well, diminutive she was. I mean, she was tiny. The images of her I grew up with — the fierce cave woman in the prehistoric getup in One Million Years B.C., the bikini-clad possible femme fatale from Lady In Cement, the scientist in the curve-hugging white jumpsuit in Fantastic Voyage, the roller-skating bruiser in Kansas City Bomber, and of course a kind of manifestation of the Devil Herself in Bedazzled — are of formidable women. Her generously proportioned curves and sensuous lips were used as cues for male lust, but her bearing was never passive. So it was a shock to meet someone so tiny. I, like so many guys of my generation, thought her larger than life. 

Later in her life, when she was more or less retired from film acting, the Illinois-born Welch spoke of her South American heritage — her father was Bolivian, and her birth name was Jo Raquel Tejada. But it wasn’t something that came up too much in her rise to stardom. After her family moved to San Diego, she studied dance and worked in television before pursuing film. She got a bit part in an Elvis movie (what aspiring starlet of the early ‘60s didn’t?). In the second-string beach movie A Swingin’ Summer (1965) she plays a knockout whose horn-rimmed glasses are supposed to convey the idea that she’s hiding her light under a bushel. The old “secretly sexy librarian” bit. Truth to tell she arguably looks even better with glasses than without. 

1966 was her breakout year. On loan to inspired British schlockmeisters Hammer from MGM, she played monosyllabic cavewoman Loana in One Million Years B.C. Little boys seeing the movie in theaters got a double assault — the great stop-motion animated dinosaurs by Ray Harryhausen inspired one kind of awe, Raquel in the fur bikini inspired another. A great, and confusing, time to be alive. (The scene in Kenneth Branagh’s 2021 Belfast in which the family goes to the cinema and father and son are delighted by these sights was important enough to Branagh that he broke out of black-and-white and reproduced the on-screen sight in their original color.) Then there was Fantastic Voyage, in which Welch played the assistant to a surgeon who’s undertaking a radical new way of operating: by shrinking down to microscopic size and traveling through the patient’s body. This was an ultra-neato concept by young filmgoer standards. Imagine an environment in which you can meet your death by smothering via white corpuscle! Tidily directed by Richard Fleischer, Fantastic Voyage still holds up in its cheesy way, as does Raquel’s white jumpsuit. 

Pictures like these highlighted Welch’s screen presence in ways that weren’t entirely wholesome, but were always apt. Welch didn’t play dumb, didn’t caricature the idea of the sex bomb the way blondes of the prior generation like Jayne Mansfield did. She could stand up to Frank Sinatra’s tough detective Tony Rome in Lady In Cement, but even there she wore her bombshell proportions lightly. When there were jokes associated with her screen presence, she had the air of being entirely in on them. As when she played the embodiment of Lust in 1967s Bedazzled, the antic comedic Faust variant cooked up by British comedic greats Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. “I find clothes so constricting. We must allow our pores to breathe. Can you hear my pores breathe?” she says to Moore’s hapless Stanley while trying to tempt him away from true love. Back in England a couple of years later, Welch had a funny cameo as “The Priestess of the Whip,” presiding over a host of galley slaves, in caustic satire The Magic Christian. 

She was subjected to a lot of jibes from critics back in the day, some more sexist than others. The L.A. Times reviewer Kevin Thomas compared her to inexpressive Camp goddess Maria Montez, and not favorably. While nobody, least of all herself, expected Welch to give Chekhov a whirl, as her career went on she often served her material better than it served her. Exhibit A, the spectacularly frenetic and flailing 1970 sex farce Myra Breckinridge, in which she played the title role as Gore Vidal’s movie-mad trans woman. Who is played pre-transition by the critic Rex Reed, then slim and young and movie-star good looking. Both performers were extremely game, rarely if ever betraying any “get me the hell out of here” jitters. It’s a movie that needs to be seen to be believed — that shouldn’t be read as a recommendation necessarily. 

Maybe it’s the kid in me, but I found her work in the late-’60s-early-’70s Westerns Bandolero, 100 Rifles, and Hannie Caulder no more or less credible than the work of her male costars, who included Dean Martin, Jimmy Stewart, Jim Brown, Burt Reynolds, Robert Culp and Ernest Borgnine. All three of the pictures are broad, swaggering revisionist Westerns and of the three, Hannie Caulder can be called a Very Good Movie without qualification. And as we get into the 1970s, we see Welch displaying real comic chops as a sharp-tongued self-aware Hollywood pinup girl in the delicious mystery The Last of Sheila. In the two Musketeers films she made with director Richard Lester, she got real laughs doing real pratfalls as a charming but klutzy seamstress who’s the love object of Michael York’s D’Artagnan. These pictures remain the gold standard of cinematic Dumas adaptations, and Welch’s stalwart and unassuming work in them is a significant factor in their delight. 

Throughout her career she maintained a thick skin about critical slings and arrows and also did the sex symbol business her way. She never did an explicit sex scene, nor a nude photo shoot. In an interview she did after playing a role in 2017’s How To Be A Latin Lover, she recalled that producers “tried that sort of thing on me when I was starting out, they’d say, ‘Now you’re gonna be in the shower, so you’re taking off your shirt,’ and I’d say, ‘maybe not.’” Admitting her determination was borne of an old-school kind of feeling she said that in pictures “you’re not giving away body and soul — it’s a performance.” While not decrying other actors who made different choices, she maintained that she “didn’t want to get so personal” with her depictions. And she never did.

Peter Medak, the second unit director on Welch’s 1967 spy picture Fathom, who went on to a distinguished directorial career himself (The Ruling Class, The Changeling), recalled of Welch: “I liked her very much because she was such a genuine person.” From what I saw, both on screen and in person, that’s what she remained.

 Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.