Color Photos of Young Raquel Welch: The Classic Beauty of the 1960s

Animals & Nature, Vintage Wonders Sep 16, 2025

Raquel Welch, whose real name is Jo Raquel Tejada, was born in 1940. She is an American actress and sex symbol. After the release of a movie poster in 1966 that showed her natural endowments in a wild and woolly prehistoric bikini, she became famous around the world.

She was the oldest of three kids. Her father, Armand C. Tejada, was a Bolivian structural engineer from Castilian descent. Her mother, Josephine Sarah (Hall) Tejada, was a statistics clerk at an aviation plant and was of English and Scottish lineage.

In 1958, Welch graduated from secondary school with honours. Welch went to San Diego State College on a theatre arts scholarship because she wanted to be an actress. The next year, she married her high school love, James Welch.

Welch created a unique film identity that made her an icon of the 1960s and 1970s by playing strong female characters that helped her break the mould of the traditional symbol.

Her rise to fame in the middle of the 1960s is largely to blame for Hollywood’s less aggressive promotion of the blonde bombshell.

In 1974, she won a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Actress in a Musical or Comedy for her role in The Three Musketeers.

Empire magazine named Welch one of the “100 Stars in Film History” in 1995.

Welch was the third star of the twentieth century, according to Playboy. Men’s Health put her at number two on its list of the “Hottest Women of All Time” in 2011.

Welch played a big role in changing America’s perception of what a woman should be like. She was the most famous sex symbol of the 1960s and 1970s, not the blonde bombshell of the late 1950s, like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and others.

Raquel once famously quipped, “What I do on screen is not the same as what I do in my real life.” I don’t enjoy a lot of fuss in public, but I do like it in private.

She also said, “I wasn’t raised to be a sex symbol, and it’s not in my nature to be one.” The fact that I became one is arguably the most beautiful, glamorous, and lucky mistake.