Life Lessons from Raquel Welch

Welcome to Life Lessons. This week, we are mourning the loss of actress, model, and icon Raquel Welch, who pioneered Hollywood’s wave of bronzed brunettes. We revisited her January 1975 Interview cover story where, over lunch with Andy Warhol, she discusses main-character syndrome in New York, big hair, and her uneasy relationship to being a sex symbol. Almost twenty years later, Welch appeared on our cover again, this time with her daughter Tahnee, fielding questions from the legendary Ingrid Sischy on motherhood, defying cliches, and how Andy Warhol’s death changed New York. 

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“I think everybody in New York looks like a character in a movie. I always think I’m looking at some famous actor when I’m in New York.”

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“It was all insecurity about being a sex symbol. Not being able to leave the dressing room and this type of thing. I mean, and it gets to the point where you can’t go to the supermarket because you get frightened that people will think you a disappointment because they have this image of you.”

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“I can remember the day Andy died. It seemed so shocking. I was on the island of Mustique with a friend of mine, a New Yorker, and she came running out and said, ‘You won’t believe this–Andy Warhol is dead.’ And I went, ‘What? What? You’re kidding.’ I was in the swimming pool, and the sun was shining. It was just the kind of situation Andy would have loved Princess Margaret and Lord Glenconner and Mick Jagger and all these people. But when I heard that news, a chill came over me and I said, ‘My god, it’s the end of an era. New York is just not going to be the same.'”

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“I was not a sex image for men. I was a sex image for women.”

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“I think people get really uptight when the economy’s not going well and there’s a lack of openness and tolerance.”

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“Everything’s a big fat cliché, as far as the media’s concerned, and sometimes there’s no way out of this little cul-de-sac they put you in.”

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“I think Katharine Hepburn had the right idea when she said you don’t get married and you don’t have kids if you’re going to be an actress. I hadn’t heard those wonderful words of wisdom when I started out.”

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“To be a woman is a very, very complicated thing.”

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“I was athletic and tanned and formidable. And you were going to have to go through something to come up to this chick. I was no pushover.”

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