EXCLUSIVE: And God created woman!
EXCLUSIVE: And God created woman! Never-before-seen outtakes from Raquel Welch's sultry 1960s photoshoots are uncovered after being hidden away in a filing cabinet for over 50 years
Never-before-seen photos of the legendary Raquel Welch have surfaced after being hidden away for over five decades in an old filing cabinet and are being revealed by DailyMail.com for the first time.
The stunning photos of the One Million Years B.C. actress that were taken by famed British photographer Terry O'Neill in the 1960s. They are outtakes of model shoots Welch did at the time.
'I call them the lost photoshoot of Raquel Welch,' said Klaus Moeller, CEO of Globe Entertainment and Media, who discovered the negatives by chance while looking for another set of photos at his office in Las Vegas.
Moeller found the negatives of the sultry sex symbol just a month before Welch's death at age 82 last month following a short illness.
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Klaus Moeller, CEO of Globe Entertainment and Media, found the photos and told DailyMail.com, 'I grabbed it and opened it up and nearly had a heart attack'
'We opened the cabinet and there wasn't really much stuff inside it and then in the back there was this little yellow envelope that said Terry O'Neill and I said, no it can't be true. So I grabbed it and opened it up and nearly had a heart attack,' a delighted Moeller told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.
'They're negatives so you can't really see them that well, so I sent them to Weldon Color Lab which is the best photographic lab on the West Coast. I said can you look through these and pick out like five or six and get me some high resolution scans so I know what's in there. And those are what came back.
'I have all the negatives. We found all of them. Someone at Globe Photos put all of the negative strips in an envelope and stuffed it at the back of a filing cabinet, and that was it. They were gone. No one even knew they existed,' said Moeller.
'Both Terry and Raquel would have loved to have seen these forgotten photographs. They show Raquel in the most relaxed mood on her bed and on the beach,' Moeller told DailyMail.com.
The photos show her on Miami Beach in a white dress and cowboy hat, and others in her bed wearing nothing but a towel.
Moeller who has been in the art and photography business for over thirty years explained that Globe Photos would have hired O'Neill back in 1968 to do the photoshoot with Raquel Welch.
The editor at the time would have then selected a handful of negatives to publish, leaving behind some 300 negatives never to be seen until now.
Moeller, who was born in Germany and grew up in the south of Portugal before moving to London and eventually making his home in Los Angeles, was close friends with O'Neill who died in 2019.
The famous photographer had two shows at Moeller's Celebrity Vault gallery in Beverly Hills, including his Goddess exhibit in 2011 featuring his iconic photo of a sexy Raquel Welch wearing a fur bikini on a crucifix.
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Moeller thinks the newly-found photos should join Terry O'Neill's archive, which was sold to Iconic Images when the photographer was still alive
'Raquel and Terry were very good friends. Raquel came to the event and she looked amazing. She was wearing a pink cowboy hat and arrived in a white convertible Mercedes.
'Simon Cowell, who is a big art collector, was also there and we all went out for dinner after the show,' said Moeller.
Globe Entertainment and Media, which was acquired by Moeller several years ago, has some 25 million archives dating back to the 1930s.
'Our archives also include the Golden Years of Hollywood with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart,' he said.
As for the found photos of Raquel Welch, Moeller thinks they should join Terry O'Neill's archive which was sold to Iconic Images when the photographer was still alive.
'This way Terry's archive will be complete,' said Moeller. 'Terry was my dear friend and I want to honor his work and of course Raquel, whose beauty was captured so brilliantly in these photos.'