After almost 40 years of playing Anglo roles and having her own Latin father dismiss his heritage upon moving to America, Raquel Welch finally began embracing her Latina side in the early 2000s. In an interview with The New York Times, the actress revealed, "I'm happy to acknowledge it and it's long overdue ... There's been kind of an empty place here in my heart and also in my work for a long, long time."

That emptiness started when Welch was a little girl. "Dad seemed indifferent to his heritage," she wrote in Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage (via Oprah.com), adding, "This made me feel like there was something wrong with being from Bolivia, 'a third-world country.'" As Welch grew up and her star rose with her, different people attempted to stifle her roots. As one of Tinseltown's biggest pinup girls of the '60s, Hollywood execs tried getting Welch to dye her hair blonde and change her first name. While she did change her hair color, she refused the latter. 

"[People in Hollywood] said, 'Nobody would remember that name, Raquel ... We think you should be called Debbie," the diva told Piers Morgan on Life Stories. "I was a little bit ornery and I felt, 'I'm not giving it up. If I'm worth anything they'll remember it." It turns out, they most definitely did.

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