The daughter of an English actress and a Bolivian engineer, she was born as Jo Raquel Tejada in 1940 in Chicago. She was the eldest of three children.
At the age of two, she moved to California with her parents. From an early age, she sang, danced and acted in school plays. In Hollywood, Welch initially made a living as a model, bar waitress or weather announcer. Thanks to her appearance, she subsequently made a name for herself in the film.
In it, she first shone in the film A Million Years Before Christ (1966), in which she appeared in bold leather outfits.
During her career, she made dozens of adventure films and westerns. These were, for example, 100 Rifles from 1969, the adaptation of The Three Musketeers from 1973, where she starred with Michael York, or the film Animal from 1977 with Jean Paul Belmond.
For many viewers, she was one of the sex symbols of the movie screen. In 1995, British magazine Empire placed her near the top of the “100 Sexiest Movie Stars in History” list, and Playboy magazine named her the third “sexiest star of the 20th century”, according to TMZ.com.
Welch married four times in her life, the first in 1959 and the last in 1999, but none of the marriages worked out. She divorced her last husband a few years after the wedding, and has not remarried since 2004.
Her daughter Tahnee is also an actress.
Raquel Welch in a photo from 2022
