Born Jo Raquel Tejada on September 5, 1940, in Chicago, Welch's family moved to San Diego when she was a toddler. She went to San Diego State on a theater arts scholarship and got her start as a local TV weather forecaster before landing guest roles on such classic television series as McHale's Navy, Bewitched, The Virginian, and others.
The breakout role for Welch (pictured) came as Cora in the wild 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage, starring Stephen Boyd, Edmund O'Brien and Arthur Kennedy. The film follows the adventures of a group of people who are reduced in size along with a submarine and injected into the bloodstream of an almost killed scientist in an attempt to save his life. But they only have an hour before they return to full size.
The film won Oscars for its visual effects and for Art Direction/Set Decoration and became a cult classic. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film is still at 91% fresh.
In the 1970s, she guest-starred on television on the ABC comedy series Mork & Mindy (with Robin Williams) and as herself on The Muppet Show. Welch did not have regular television roles until the 1990s, in Central Park West, a prime time soap opera from Darren Star (Emily in Paris) on CBS. She also appeared in an episode of Seinfeld. In the years that followed, Welch could still be seen in the ABC comedy series 8 Simple Rules and the CBS crime series CSI: Miami.
Welch's (pictured below) career spanned more than fifty years, thirty films and numerous television series and appearances, including a dozen visits to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson over two decades. She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Imagen Foundation in 2001. Her last regular series role was in 2017, in the Canadian comedy series Date My Dad.