Many happy returns to that screen bombshell Miss Raquel Welch, seventy years young today, and still looking fabulous!
Even now still most famous for swanning around a polystyrene set in an animal-skin bikini in the godawful One Million Years BC, the young Jo Racquel Tejada was "discovered" while working as a cocktail waitress.
With her good looks and perfect figure she was inevitably going to be typecast as a sex symbol in the Swinging 60s, and true to form she spent most of her time in Fantastic Voyage in a skin-tight diving suit, rarely changed out of her bikini in A Swinging Summer, and was given the part of the deadly sin "Lust" in Peter Cook & Dudley Moore's Bedazzled.
By far her weirdest role was as a transsexual in the cult film Myra Breckenridge (based on the scandalous Gore Vidal novel), opposite a sex siren of a much earlier age Mae West! Despite her wonderfully rip-roaring part in The Three Musketeers, Miss Welch's career in movies never really went very far (she never got many serious leading roles, certainly), and thus the glittering world of TV beckoned. She hosted her own variety show throughout the 70s with Tom Jones, and has made numerous guest appearances in TV shows ever since - my favourite being her incredibly camp "Aunt Vesta" in Sabrina the Teenage Witch...
Ignoring her ill-fated attempt at a pop "career" in the 80s, here is Raquel Welch doing what she does best - playing the vamp (and singing!):
She is simply faboo.
Racquel Welch on IMDB
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