Welch was only five feet, six inches tall, but she came across as statuesque and hard and a little imperious, a warrior without any of the vulnerability that had characterized sex symbols of the past, from Clara Bow to Rita Hayworth to Marilyn Monroe. She had a spectacularly constructed face made even more striking by mid-1960s eye make-up and a mane of teased hair. In the still photos that first made her a star, she keeps her mouth slightly open and her eyes wide, yet the effect is commanding, as if Welch knew full well what a stunner and head-turner she was and was enjoying it to the maximum.
Welch never did a nude scene on screen, even when this became standard in the 1970s, and when she posed for Playboy, she did not do any full nude photos, which was canny of her. She was an old-fashioned withholding sex symbol in that way. Welch can be seen as a transitional figure, and what a figure it was, nearly beyond belief. But even when she was displaying it in a bikini, she seemed to be fully armored and nearly unreal in her resplendent physical perfection.
She was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois, in 1940. Her father was of Spanish descent, and her mother was of English ancestry, a link to Rita Hayworth, whose parentage was similar. Welch grew up in California and studied ballet until she was told her body would never do what she wanted it to do as a ballet dancer; she began to win beauty contest prizes, and she married her high school sweetheart James Welch and had two children. After her divorce from Welch, she moved with her children to Dallas and worked as a cocktail waitress and at the Neiman Marcus store; she later described this as a precarious and tough time for her.
Welch moved to L.A. and eventually got a manager named Patrick Curtis, who decided to build her up as a new sex symbol; she married him in 1967. After some TV appearances, she signed a contract with Fox, who wanted to change her first name to Debbie. She was told that Raquel would be too hard to pronounce, but she resisted. Welch had only three lines in “One Million Years B.C.,” yet that poster of her in the fur bikini was everywhere in the late 1960s. When she played with Edward G. Robinson in “The Biggest Bundle of Them All” (1968), the veteran actor spoke warningly in the press about a body only taking you so far in show business.