How One Poster Turned Raquel Welch Into an Icon — and What She Really Thought About It (12 photos)

Raquel Welch — a Golden Globe-winning actress with two Broadway runs under her belt — cemented her place in pop culture history through a movie where she had just three lines of dialogue. On September 5, 2026, she would have turned 86. A promo still from the set of

One Million Years B.C.

(1966) became the best-selling pin-up poster of an era, and 28 years later, it famously masked an escape tunnel in

The Shawshank Redemption

. Welch later called it the "most glamorous fluke of my life."





The Movie She Never Wanted to Make

In 1966, 20th Century Fox signed Raquel Welch to a long-term contract following her breakout role in the sci-fi adventure

Fantastic Voyage

. Welch expected the studio to offer her compelling, complex roles. Instead, she was immediately loaned out to Britain's Hammer Film Productions for a prehistoric fantasy flick.



Raquel was initially fiercely opposed to starring in a dinosaur movie, but her contract left her with no choice.

One Million Years B.C.

was a remake of a 1940 film about cavemen coexisting with dinosaurs. Welch pushed back hard.

"I told Dick Zanuck, 'I’m not doing this movie because it's a dinosaur movie and I don't want to be in a dinosaur movie,'" she recalled in a 2017 interview with Fox News Digital.

Zanuck, the studio head, was brief: "No, you are doing it, Raquel."





Filming took place high in the volcanic mountains of the Canary Islands amidst biting winds.

Shot on the high volcanic slopes of the Canary Islands, conditions were freezing. The crew bundled up in heavy parkas while Welch stood shivering in her fur costume. When she asked for a blanket, she was told, "Cave girls don't wear jackets." In the end, her character, Loana, had just three lines of dialogue in the entire film.

"I thought it was going to be a silly dinosaur movie that everyone would forget," she admitted to the Associated Press in 1981.

The Costume That Changed Everything

Welch’s sole outfit for the movie was created by theatrical costume designer Carl Toms. He draped the actress in a deerskin pelt and literally cut out the shape with scissors directly on her body. The result was a fur bikini — rugged on the outside, softly lined within.



Carl Toms tailored the costume directly on the actress with a pair of scissors — accidentally creating an iconic look for an entire decade.

When Hammer studio released promotional stills from the set, the unexpected happened. A single shot — Welch standing on a rock, arms slightly outstretched — swept across the globe. Poster artist Tom Chantrell captured that exact pose for the official movie poster: Welch in a bikini, bold red title lettering, and dinosaurs in the background. It became the best-selling pin-up poster since Betty Grable’s famous World War II photo, which GIs used to order by the 50,000 every month.



Illustrated by Tom Chantrell based on a real promotional photo, the original photograph actually eclipsed the movie poster itself in popularity.

Welch didn't realize what had happened until she returned home.

"I was off in this remote location in the Canary Islands. By the time I came back, suddenly everybody knew who I was. I couldn't wrap my head around it," she told the New York Post in 2014.

Playboy later named Welch the "Most Desired Woman of the 1970s" — despite the fact that she never posed fully nude.

A Poster With a Life of Its Own

Over the following decades, the image of Welch in her fur bikini took on a life of its own, far detached from the movie itself. It was reproduced in magazines, adorned millions of bedroom walls, and was printed on T-shirts and postcards. Few remembered the film — but everyone remembered the image.



Welch became an overnight sex symbol — even before the movie hit theaters. The poster blew past the film's premiere.

It was a paradox Welch felt throughout her entire career. Across a 50-year career, she starred in over 30 feature films and nearly 50 television projects. In 1975, she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical for her portrayal of the clumsy seamstress Constance in Richard Lester's

The Three Musketeers

(1973).



By the 1970 Academy Awards, Welch was already a global superstar — just four years after

One Million Years B.C.

was released.

In 1981–1982, she stepped onto Broadway to replace Lauren Bacall in the musical

Woman of the Year

, earning standing ovations. She returned to Broadway in 1997 for

Victor/Victoria

, with critics praising her comedic timing.

Yet towering over all her achievements was that single image from 1966.

A Prison Cell and a Second Life

In 1994, director Frank Darabont released

The Shawshank Redemption

, an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

. In the film, Andy Dufresne, a banker imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, spends decades hanging posters of Hollywood stars in his cell.



Three posters, three decades: Rita Hayworth in the 1940s, Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s, and Raquel Welch in the 1960s.

First Rita Hayworth, then Marilyn Monroe, and finally Raquel Welch. Each poster represents hope and freedom. And each conceals the escape tunnel he is painstakingly digging behind the wall.

Welch’s poster is the final and crucial one: it hides the tunnel during the break. In the climax, the enraged warden hurls a stone at the poster. It tears through, revealing the hollow tunnel through which Andy made his escape.



In

Shawshank

’s climax, it is Welch’s poster hiding the escape tunnel. The warden throws a rock — ripping the poster to reveal the cavernous hole.

Welch found out about the movie just like everyone else. No one had asked for her permission — the poster was simply used as a period-accurate pop culture artifact. Yet

The Shawshank Redemption

introduced her image to a whole new generation — people born long after 1966 who had never seen the dinosaur flick. To many, Raquel Welch became forever etched in memory as the woman on the poster hiding a hole in the wall.

An Actress Overshadowed by Her Own Image

In her 2010 memoir,

Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage

, Welch reflected on the sentiment that haunted her for decades:

"With the release of that famous poster, everything in my life changed in a single moment, and everything real about me was swept away. Everything else was eclipsed by this larger-than-life sex symbol persona."

It wasn't a complaint so much as a candid observation. Welch didn't disown the image or try to erase it. She kept acting, taking Broadway roles, and giving interviews. But whenever her career came up, the conversation inevitably drifted back to 1966.



Welch won a Golden Globe for her role as Constance in

The Three Musketeers

, but that achievement remained in the shadow of the 1966 poster.

Over the years, she made peace with the paradox. In a rare 2018 interview with

The Sunday Post

, she remarked:

"People ask me if I get tired of talking about that bikini, but truthfully, I don't. It was a major event in my life, so why not talk about it?"

Her Final Years

Welch remained a fixture on the red carpet well into the late 2010s, always looking flawless. Her final film appearance came in the 2017 comedy

How to Be a Latin Lover

at age 76.



In 2014, at age 73, at the Carousel of Hope Ball in Beverly Hills — one of her last major public appearances.

Raquel Welch passed away on February 15, 2023, in Los Angeles at the age of 82. Her manager cited a "brief illness" without elaborating. Over a career spanning five decades, she starred in over 30 movies, appeared on Broadway twice, and guest-starred in dozens of television shows.



July 2022, Beverly Hills — Welch's final public appearance. Seven months later, she passed away.

Yet her most famous image remains the one where she had only three lines of dialogue and an outfit snipped into shape directly on her body. The poster outlived the movie. The movie outlived the era. And an image born by chance — amidst chilly volcanic mountains and captured by a set photographer — proved more enduring than everything else.

What do you think — is there another actor or actress whose entire career was similarly overshadowed by a single iconic image?