Thoughts on Raquel Welch

Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles

By now, you've probably heard about the death of actress Raquel Welch on Wednesday at the age of 82. The conventional wisdom is that Welch was one of those actresses cast for her looks -- and yes, she was good looking -- but that she wasn't the greatest of actresses. I think that's a bit unfair, as I can think of quite a few European types that got brought in to Hollywood over the decades and turned out not to be the next big thing, and Welch was no worse than any of them.

I haven't seen anything on TCM's website about a programming tribute for Welch, and I haven't been watching the channel enough to see if they've already got a TCM Remembers piece up for her. I would guess that TCM would probably want to wait until April, after 31 Days of Oscar, to do whatever tribute they're going to do. In theory, FXM could do a tribute to her, since a lot of her 1960s movies were made at Fox, but I don't know how many of those movies are currently out of the vault. A quick search shows Lady in Cement will be on FXM this coming Tuesday. Before that, StarzEncore Westerns has a couple of airings of Bandolero! starting on Sunday.

For a slightly different look at Welch, there's this Twitter thread from David Burge with a lot of pictures of Welch and cars, some of them from before she became a movie star.

And, another blogger I read point out that the famous scenes of Welch in the fur bikini in One Million Years BC came after she had her two children. Way to lose the baby weight.