“LATE – but Raquel still bowls them over,” said the front page headline in The Northern Echo of June 6, 1991, as the Hollywood sex symbol, who died on Wednesday, arrived at a wedding in the Yorkshire Dales.
For the media, it was a marriage made in heaven: Damon, 31, the son of the actress best known for wearing a fur bikini when being attacked by a super-size but slow-moving turtle was tying the knot with Rebecca, 25, the daughter of Yorkshire’s finest fast bowler: Fiery Fred Trueman.
Raquel Welch with her son Damon. Rebecca Trueman is in the middle with her sister, Karen, on the right and their father Fred on the right
The happy couple had got married quietly 14 months earlier in Los Angeles in front of two witnesses but came to Bolton Abbey, near Skipton, for a blessing with a media circus in tow.
And Raquel stole the show. Not only did she arrive 10 minutes late, but as she unfurled her long legs from her chauffeur-driven limo, eyes popped as the 50-year-old was wearing a dress for which the tabloid reporters had a thesaurus of cliches to describe it with, from figure-hugging to plunging neckline.
The Echo’s John North columnist, Stephen Brenkley, who was in the crowd, was more restrained.
“Raquel still looks splendid,” he wrote. “Everybody around was trying to think of ways to describe the dress. It was a little black number par excellence. It bulged in all the right places, was backless and fell only to her knee so that when she sat down an expanse of thigh showed. Somebody at the church said: "Not frightened of showing off her body, is she?" but it was the understandable voice of envy, not of censure.”
Fred, puffing like billy-o on his trademark pipe, was a little older at 60.
“His eyes are rheumy now, his brows have spread with his tummy and the backside has got no smaller with the passing years,” said the columnist of the legendary cricketer who, in his prime, had taken 2,304 first-class wickets, 307 of which were for England in Tests (none of this T20 knockabout nonsense in Fred’s day).
Together, Raquel and Fred formed the most unlikely partnership cricket has ever seen.
Raquel Welch in her famous fir bikini in One Million Years BC, the 1966 fantasy film which made her name
“There they were,” said John North, “the stunning sex goddess and the demon fast bowler pouring out mutual appreciation. "He's a lovely man, adorable," said Raquel Welch of Fred Trueman. "She's a smasher, delightful," said Fred of Raquel.”
And so it fell to Fred’s 87-year-old mother, Ethel, to lob a bouncer at the actress for overshadowing the proceedings. “You know, young lady,” she fumed, “that’s not the kind of outfit to be wearing at a wedding blessing.”
Fred dancing with his 25-year-old daughter at the wedding in 1991
Not everyone was offended. “Damon and I were really the daisies on the lawn compared to Raquel and my dad, but we didn’t have a hard time with that – even if it seemed like everyone else around us was concerned about it,” said Rebecca a couple of years ago. “What else would you expect when you put a sex symbol and Yorkshire sporting hero together?”
Raquel found the blessing emotionally challenging and had to “repair her face” on several occasions. "I cried into my gloves all the time," she said. "I forgot the Kleenex."
However, after all this furore, Rebecca and Damon split up after just 15 months.
“That marriage didn’t last as long as my run-up,” said Fred, quite brilliantly.
A few years later, Rebecca remarried a film producer with whom she has two children and they live, happily ever after, in LA.
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