In art we have the Venus de Milo as the indisputable canon of feminine beauty. In popular culture there is Raquel Welch. And I say this despite the news of her death, because the image of her as a beautiful Neanderthal, stuffed into a kind of fur bikini, from the film A Million Years Ago, has been imprinted in the popular memory in an imperishable way. . Beyond tastes and fashions. Let’s say, for the sake of scientific correctness, that a skeleton like his has never been discovered in Atapuerca. A million years ago it is rather mediocre. But Raquel has been and will be the most beautiful troglodyte we will ever see. She is one of the icons in the history of cinema and, incidentally, of all popular culture.
For her part, she never protested her role as a sex symbol or the photos that, even now, she had to sign of her in fur and spear in hand. When someone made her ugly in that role, she would remember the advice James Stewart gave her when she was at the pinnacle of her fame: never avoid fans or the things fans admire, and that advice she stuck to throughout her career. .
The truth is that Raquel Welch would not have lasted long if she had only been that, a body. She also had that something characteristic of the stars. An indefinite gift that the camera grants to a few, something that goes beyond canonical beauty, photogenicity or interpretive capacity. Raquel Welch had what we could define as charisma. A charisma that she already revealed in her first film, shot in 1964 with Elvis, when Elvis eclipsed everyone who stood next to her. The truth is that she did not like to be pigeonholed and she fought against the stereotype of erotic myth without ever abjuring it. You just have to remember that she played the first interracial sex scene, along with Jim Brown, in the film 100 Rifles and the first remembered role of a trans heroine in the film Myra Breckinridge, in the distant 1970s, when she still did not know herself. I knew very well what that was, let alone accepted it. Raquel, the Body, taught a whole generation of spectators and spectators what it was all about.
It was much more difficult for her to recognize her Latin origins and her real name, Jo-Raquel Tejada, although later, at the end of her career, she was more than proud of her Hispanic ancestry, as she demonstrated when she interpreted, in her sixties, a role of midwife Latina in a television series. They claim that MGM fired her for wanting to do her hair her way. Raquel Welch, Corps. And the character.