Obituary: Raquel Welch

Raquel Welch’s ability to entertain comes through if you think about it

The scope of Raquel Welch’s ability to entertain comes through if you think about it.

The voluptuous sex symbol—an icon of fashion in the Seventies who died this week at 82—was painted by Salvador Dali, solicited for a nude centerfold by Hugh Hefner and greeted by the queen of England. Raquel Welch co-starred with Bob Hope, Harvey Keitel, Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Jodie Foster, Frank Sinatra, Burt Reynolds, Bill Cosby, James Stewart, Robin Williams and John Wayne as well as Reese Witherspoon, Cher and Mae West. By most accounts, what impresses colleagues is her warmth, tenacity and intelligence.

Throughout a career on stage, television and in movies, Raquel Welch conveyed poise with photogenic beauty. Breaking the color barrier with Jim Brown in 100 Rifles, playfully amusing audiences with her bosomy villain Constance in both hit Alexandre Dumas Three Musketeers adaptations, using her ballet training to dance in films and TV shows, she caught and kept audience attention. Whether as a stewardess in an episode of ABC’s Bewitched, as Alice in Anthony Perkins’s biting, cryptic The Last of Sheila or as an avenger in the Western Hannie Caulder (which her company produced), Miss Welch showed range and a fresh take. Raquel Welch played the title’s transsexual in a version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge with Farrah Fawcett. She headlined top-rated TV programs and appeared in episodes of Seinfeld, Spin City and The Virginian. Comedienne Ruth Buzzi, who worked with her on NBC’s Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, posted a tribute to Welch as “lovely.”

After she finally posed for Playboy in 1979, without appearing totally nude, the magazine’s founder, Hugh Hefner, wrote that:

Raquel Welch, one of the last of the classic sex symbols, came from the era when you could be considered the sexiest woman in the world without taking your clothes off. She declined to do complete nudity, and I yielded gracefully. The pictures prove her point.”

During an appearance in 2014 on Fox News Channel’s The O'Reilly Factor, Raquel Welch described herself as leaning politically to the right, embracing what she described as her mother Josephine’s Midwestern values. First-born Raquel Welch, who married four times and is survived by her two children, also supported American soldiers during the Vietnam War, performing for U.S. troops at United Service Organization (USO) shows. She also headlined shows on Broadway and in Las Vegas.

Raquel Welch was a woman of principle. When a movie studio fired her from Cannery Row (1982), an adaptation of the novel by John Steinbeck, replacing her with Debra Winger opposite Nick Nolte, she sued. After it was disclosed and argued during the trial that the studio made false claims and used firing Welch as a front for bad money management, she won a jury judgment of over $10 million.

Afterwards, however, Miss Welch was blacklisted by Hollywood studios; she never made another major movie. Yet she still appeared on the red carpet, attending awards ceremonies while smiling, looking as beautiful, stunning and sensuous as ever, telling one interviewer that she merely wanted to be cast to act in movies. As an entrepreneur later in life, Raquel Welch owned and operated a successful wig company, so it should surprise no one that she also read, enjoyed and persistently sought to meet Ayn Rand, which, according to Miss Welch, she did in New York City in 1981—the year before Ayn Rand died. When interviewed for the Ayn Rand Archives’ oral history program in 1998, she remembered meeting the author of Atlas Shrugged for lunch:

She was quite grand in her demeanor and deportment, and I liked her immediately, because she reminded me of all the grand dames in my past that I had always loved, the great divas of the stage…[s]he seemed to have a sense of humor, a twinkle, and a vitality.…

I spoke to her about how excited I was by her writing, and how inspirational I thought she was, and that she had such a passion and commitment. I also said these were the kinds of things that I had in my character, and I wish there were more people who felt that way, and could be inspired; but it just seemed like people didn’t want to be inspired, that they wanted to water everything down and do everything in a convenient way, not to offend anybody, or not to be too much this way or that. I think she realized that I felt some kind of kindred spirit with her and her writing and that I was trying to say I salute the same kind of flag as you.…I thought, I’m meeting an all-time great human being, who is certainly one of the extraordinary people of the century and certainly has a specific philosophy…

My attitude is that I don’t mind if I disagree with somebody as long as I know who the hell they are. Most people are not going to show you who they really are; they’re going to hide it behind some social behavior and answers and ideas they know will be socially acceptable. I didn’t find that in her…

She told me that it was a great privilege to live in this country. That she came here, and it was like heaven, that this was the place where the future was being formed. She thought Russia was the worst, the lowest. She was pretty much like her book. She still seemed very passionate to me. I was surprised that her conversation was as passionate as any of her books, that she was still charged up with energy about this: that people don’t understand what a gift it is to live with freedom of thought, and to be able to design your own life; and people don’t realize it because Americans have never experienced being suppressed, and being told that they just have to follow along for the good of the whole. She was still saying things like that.

Question: Did her books influence you?

[Raquel Welch’s answer]: They encouraged me a lot to continue being strong-minded and courageous. I felt like I was a loner and somebody who did have a vision of the kind of woman that I wanted to portray. In many cases, people would want me for a role, physically, but they wouldn’t want my persona. They would want to water the role down and make it cute. I never liked cute women. I always thought that women should be extraordinary and magnificent.” [Emphasis added].

Early in Welch’s career, Edward G. Robinson, her co-star in MGM’s The Biggest Bundle of Them All, said: “I must say she has quite a body. She has been the product of a good publicity campaign. I hope she lives up to it because a body will only take you so far.”

Let the reader be the judge—with, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, reality as the final arbiter—as to how far, and on whose terms, Raquel Welch was willing and able to go.