I don’t know which scares me more: that so many folks I grew up watching have passed or in five to ten years I won’t know anyone on TV or in movies.
She was a sex symbol at a time when I did not know what a sex symbol was, and subsequently someone whom I knew objectively I was supposed to find attractive, but in reality I never did. One of the early signs I was not typical. Though I’m a heterosexual white* male and otherwise find women intensely appealing in all kinds of ways, the mainstream representation of “sexy” was not often it.
Anyway, RIP Ms Welch.
*sort of
She was smart and beautiful. I got the chance to talk with her for about a half hour. She was very interested in cetaceans.
I recently saw a clip from the old Mike Douglas (maybe Merv Griffin) show, where Raquel and Janis Joplin were discussing something and it was fascinating. You’d figure a conversation between “the drug-addled singer” and “the airhead sex symbol” would sound like so much crickets, but you’d be wrong. Charming, it was.
Without comment…
applause My freshman year of college, I had the One Million Years BC poster taped to the ceiling over my bed.
I actually watched that terrible movie just for her.
Same here. Growing up in the 70s, she was the personification of sexy. I’d lost track of her over the years but she was delightful in Legally Blonde, and of course her hilarious appearance on Seinfeld.
Coincidentally, driving home yesterday an afternoon radio personality was bragging about how he’d just won a dinner date with RW in an auction for a charity. I believe he said it was to take place this weekend in Palm Beach.
Was she the prototype for Selma Hayek?
Similar to my experience. My first exposure to Raquel Welch was a dad joke that another 8 year old kid shared at the playground. What is Raquel Welch’s favorite candy? Mounds. Then he grabbed his chest and exclaimed, I love my mounds. 
It was a simpler time.
I liked her as a mean-spirited bitch in Seinfeld.
RIP!
Those aren’t buoys…
And that little boy, who nobody liked, grew up to be Andy Dick. And now you know the rest of the story 
Odd, I never woulda thought of the 2 of them similarly before - other than that they were both quite attractive and well endowed. Besides their appearances being quite different, I thought SH was accepted as more of a serious actress than just a sex symbol.
Growing up, Raquel Welch was a setup for boob jokes. Strangely, I don’t recall ever seeing One Million Years B.C.; but the poster is iconic. The only other thing I remember seeing her in is Fantastic Voyage which I’ll usually watch whenever it’s on.
You just won this thread!
It seems like we’ve lost a lot of notables, and we’re only in the middle of February.
Is it true she once asked Johnny Carson if he’d like to pet her pussy? 
That legend is most commonly attributed to Zsa Zsa Gabor, but it’s false in any case.
So Johnny never said “Move the cat and I will.” 
After waiting a lifetime, I got the chance to say it twenty years ago. Whether the woman involved had ever heard of the apocryphal incident and was just setting me up, I don’t know. 
Her appearance was singular, at least to me. There were scads of extremely attractive actresses with excellent figures in the 1960s, but she somehow stood apart from all of them. I had the feeling that if you asked any other contemporary actress, even ones with far more thespian talent than she had, if they would like to trade their appearances for hers, all of them would do it in a split-second. Can you name an actress with that sort of gobstopping beauty? I really can’t, can’t even come up with someone comparable in that one regard. One of a kind, really.
She seemed closer to Jennifer Lopez.