Raquel Welch has made her peace with Loana, the scantily clad cave woman she played in the 1966 camp classic “One Million Years B.C.” The poster of Welch wearing pelts in strategic places made her a worldwide sex symbol.
“I recognize her as one part of my nature. But I just don’t want it to be my complete legacy.”
Welch is five months away from her 70th birthday. With a 50-year-old son and 48-year-old daughter, Welch is old enough to be a great-grandmother. But very few great grannies have looked like Welch.
She’s whippet-slim with barely a line on her face (she swears by Oil of Olay). Wearing black pants, a crisp long sleeve white blouse and a vest, Welch is a stunning near-septuagenarian.
Though not acting as much as during her peak of popularity, Welch certainly keeps busy. She was a regular on the 2002-03 PBS drama “American Family” and has guest starred on “Seinfeld,” “Spin City” and “Welcome to the Captain.” She’s also appeared in the films “Tortilla Soup” and “Legally Blonde.”
For the past few years, Welch has been writing “Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage,” a compelling hybrid of autobiography and self-help. She talks about her youth growing up in La Jolla, Calif. — her Brazilian-born father was tyrannical; her mother bent over backward to keep peace in the family — her early first marriage, her children, her rise to superstardom, turning 50 and dealing with menopause.
“I did write every word of my own book,” she says proudly.
“Approaching 70, it’s a landmark of sorts, and you feel that you know something and you have something to say,” Welch says. “I desperately wanted to speak to women of my generation and, being a mother, to younger girls, as well. I wanted to speak about my experience being a woman because it might help by knowing that even if you are touted as some big doo dah, the trials and tribulations and the beauty of being a woman is something that we all experience in our own way.”
But the four-time married Welch didn’t want “Beyond the Cleavage” to become a kiss-and- tell. “You don’t have to do just some dirty laundry book,” she says. “I wanted to speak about the unspeakable, like menopause. What we really don’t need to talk about much has to do with plain old sex.”
Welch also talks frankly about her firing in 1980 from the box-office flop “Cannery Row” and being replaced by a much- younger Debra Winger. She sued MGM and was awarded $14 million for breach of contract.
Her film career, though, went south. She found success on Broadway, replacing Lauren Bacall in “Woman of the Year.”
Welch says there is a paranoia that as life goes on you get less valuable. “That is not true,” she says. “As life goes on you get more valuable as a person. Many women look better. Personally, I think I look better because I have lived and I have a different kind of aura about me having lived.”
