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You are here: Home / Popular Culture / Rest in Peace, Raquel Welch

Rest in Peace, Raquel Welch

by | 21 Comments

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There’s worse reasons to be remembered. Per the NYTimes, many memorable photos [unpaywalled ‘gift’ link]:

… She was invariably described as a sex symbol, though she never posed nude for the camera in any film or photo shoot, despite the efforts of Playboy magazine and various producers. She had a key role in “Bandolero!” alongside Jimmy Stewart and Dean Martin and went on to play a woman seeking revenge in another western, “Hannie Caulder,” an inspiration for the Quentin Tarantino films “Kill Bill” and “Django Unchained.” After portraying a struggling single mother in the roller derby drama “Kansas City Bomber,” she found a home in the comedic action of a pair of Richard Lester movies, “The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers.”

She moved beyond film sets, developing a nightclub act that played to sold-out crowds in Las Vegas and became the basis for a CBS special, “Really, Raquel.” Through the 1970s, she was a regular on variety shows, singing the same song, “I’m a Woman,” with both Cher on “The Cher Show” and Miss Piggy on “The Muppet Show.”

In 1981, she had a breakthrough when she replaced Lauren Bacall as the star of “Woman of the Year” on Broadway. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow called her a “show stopper,” adding that her performance was “in all respects marked by show-business know-how.” She stayed in the role for two years, her cave woman past a distant memory.

The Hollywood Reporter, fittingly, has a longer and more descriptive obituary.

And she got to startle people one last time… news of her death circulated on Twitter as the same time as the Super Bowl victory parade, which meant that #KansasCityBomber (one of her most beloved pictures) appeared in conjunction with #KansasCityChiefs.

Reader Interactions

21Comments

  1. 1.

    opiejeanne

    I first saw her in Fantastic Voyage and several other movies in the theater, including Myra Breckenridge, Three Musketeers, Four Musketeers, and eventually One Million Years  B.C. when it was finally on tv. I was surprised to learn that she had three lines in it, because I don’t remember any dialogue at all but maybe I’m confusing it with The Quest for Fire.

    She was such a different type of “It Girl”.

  2. 2.

    Steeplejack

    @opiejeanne:

    I was surprised by her gift for comedy in the Richard Lester Musketeers movies. Definitely more there than met the eye.

    When I went to college in 1969, my mother sent me two posters for my dorm room walls: Raquel Welch in her fur bikini from One Million Years B.C. and Clint Eastwood chewing his cheroot from A Fistful of Dollars. Cool!

  5. 5.

    Splitting Image

    According to IMDB, Welch holds the record for kicking men in the nuts, having done so in 15 different movies. So she has that going for her….

    Seriously, Welch did have some chops as a comic actress, and she is definitely good in Bedazzled, The Three/Four Musketeers, and Bandolero. Her career was similar to Carol Cleveland’s, in a way. Cleveland got lucky as a young actress to get hired by Monty Python as a “glamour stooge”, but whenever they wrote a really funny part for a woman, one of them usually played it in drag, so she never really got a chance to show what she could do. The same thing happened to Welch. Directors had a specific thing in mind when they hired her, and it often involved more looking pretty than being interesting, so you’re left wondering if she was really a good actress or not.

    Another thing Welch has in her favour is that Michael and Harry Medved called her the worst actress of all time. (Their choice for worst actor was Richard Burton, which gives you an idea of how reliable they are.)

  6. 6.

    Tony Jay

    She could sing, she could act, and by the pebbled skin of Ernest Borgnine she was an astonishingly beautiful woman. Those eyes, that smile, that skin, wow. Unfortunately she was too beautiful for the movie industry of the time to give her the credit she deserved for the rest of it.

    Also I hear she could kill a man with one punch, and often did. Left a trail of corpses wherever she went. Edward Woodward’s character in The Equaliser was based on the time she spent running her own private security firm in San Francisco in the mid-70s. True story.

  8. 8.

    Evap

    she was just perfect in Bedazzled, playing Lust.  One of my all time favorite movies.  The original of course!  Also I remember seeing 1 million years BC in the movie theater when I was a youngster.

  10. 10.

    2liberal

    @Tony Jay:Edward Woodward’s character in The Equaliser was based on the time she spent running her own private security firm in San Francisco in the mid-70s. True story

     

    Can’t find it. Not seeing it in wikipedia.  Can you provide a link please?

  13. 13.

    Qrop Non Sequitur

    I feel guilty, but my first reaction was to remember Mary Tyler Moore’s obituary for Raquel Welch some 50 years ago.

  14. 14.

    Another Scott

    She was just incredibly beautiful.  It got her obvious attention, but it meant that few saw beyond her beauty.

    I thought she was very good in the black comedy Mother, Jugs & Speed. It’s a period piece, so cringeworthy, but there’s also humanity in it.

    RIP.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  18. 18.

    Ruckus

    @Steeplejack:

    Definitely more there than met the eye.

    In Hollywood, beauty, especially in a woman, is often considered to be a sign of a lack of anything else. Actually this happens a lot in any world. But most humans are more than the outside. Women often are judged only by that outside. And of course she was stunning outside. But that absolutely does not mean the inside is lacking. Humans sometimes are one sided. Sometimes, some humans. But many, likely most humans can be far more if given the chance or the opportunity. She was far more. But in a business that often put the person in a box, a box that could be called their specialty box. She was put in a specialty box called beauty. Because she was. But she deserved far more because she was far more, in a world which often only allows one specialty, one talent. We’ve likely known someone who does or have ourselves put others in a small box, a one talent box because that’s all we saw. It’s seldom right to do that. And when that one talent box is all we see, we often don’t even consider there might be all those other boxes.

  20. 20.

    Tony Jay

    @2liberal:

    Sorry, no. All of the documentary evidence was torched by Jan Michael-Vincent after he had that incident with the peyote pecan pie and a canister of jet fuel at the audition’s for Fame, and the only people still alive to tell the tale of what they witnessed firsthand are too frightened of Neil Young’s righteous vengeance to go on the record.

    Either that or I made it up.

  21. 21.

    opiejeanne

    @Another Scott: Alan Ladd, jr. read the script and said something like, “It’s so offensive. It has something to offend everyone. Can you make it for 3 million bucks?”

    I’m glad someone else remembered that she was in that movie. I had to look up the cast because I didn’t remember who else was in it. OJ was a surprise, as was Harvey Keitel.

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