Raquel Welch (b.1940,) born Jo Raquel Tejada, is an American actress and singer. She is a celebrated sex symbol who took the worldwide media by storm after the 1966 release of a movie poster, and, in so doing, brought Latina beauty to the mainstream attraction.
Born in Chicago with Bolivian, English, and Irish ancestry, Welch spent her formative years in Southern California. As a child, she studied ballet and began entering beauty contests as a teenager. She worked as a model, waitress, and television weather girl before making her film début in A House is Not a Home (1964.) Her skimpily clad appearance in One Million Years B.C. (1966) launched her as a curvaceous sex symbol.
Rarely challenged by later roles, she displayed some comic talent in The Three Musketeers (1973,) for which she received a Golden Globe Award.
A nightclub entertainer and bestselling author of health and beauty books and videos, she has also found some success on stage, notably in the Broadway musical Woman of the Year (1982.) Active in television drama, she returned to the cinema for the first time since 1977 in Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994,) and made her British stage début in The Millionaires (1996.)
Welch’s beauty has lasted the decades, and she appeared in cameo roles in Legally Blonde (2001,) Tortilla Soup (2001,) and Forget about It (2006.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Raquel Welch
Once you get rid of the idea that you must please other people before you please yourself, and you begin to follow your own instincts—only then can you be successful. You become more satisfied, and when you are other people tend to be satisfied by what you do.
—Raquel Welch
Topics: Confidence, Assurance
You can’t fake listening. It shows.
—Raquel Welch
Change excites me. I am fifty years old. It’s when the mind catches up with the body.
—Raquel Welch
Topics: Change
I was always willing to take a great deal of the burden of getting along in life on my own shoulders, but I wasn’t willing to give myself a pat on the back. I was always looking to somebody else to give me that … That was all wrong.
—Raquel Welch
Topics: Realization, Acceptance, Awareness
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