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Raquel Welch Filmography
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Raquel Welch: Career
In 1959, Raquel Welch played the title role in the famous Ramona Pageant, a yearly outdoor play at Hemet, California, which is based on the novel Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson.
Welch became a weather forecaster at a local San Diego television station. Because of her heavy schedule, she decided to leave college. Her marriage broke up and she moved with her two children to Dallas, Texas, where she modeled for Neiman-Marcus and worked as a cocktail hostess, intending to move on to New York City from there.
Instead, she moved back to California. She found a place in Los Angeles and started making the rounds of the movie studios. She was cast in bit parts in a few films, including Roustabout starring
Elvis Presley. Welch's first starring role was in A Swingin' Summer, which led to a contract with 20th Century Fox. She was then cast in the Sci-fi hit Fantastic Voyage.
On loan out to Hammer Studios in Britain, she starred in the remake of One Million Years B.C.. After her appearance as Lust incarnate in Bedazzled, she returned to the United States and appeared in a Western with
James Stewart titled Bandolero!
, which was followed by Lady in Cement with
Frank Sinatra. Her first real starring role was in Myra Breckinridge with
Mae West, which turned out to be a dismal failure.
Despite box office disappointments, Welch became one of the leading sex symbols of the 1960s and 1970s. Her most memorable publicity still, where she was clad in a furry animal-skin bikini for One Million Years B.C., became a bestselling poster.
Her television appearances include the series The Hollywood Palace
, the made for TV movies The Legend of Walks Far Woman
and Right to Die, in which she turned in a stirring performance as a woman with Lou Gehrig's disease, and in the PBS series American Family, about a Mexican American family in East Los Angeles. She has also appeared in the night time soap opera CPW and made infomercials and exercise videos.
She has also performed in a nightclub act in Las Vegas and has starred on Broadway in Woman of the Year
and in Victor/Victoria, where she replaced
Julie Andrews.
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