When cricket met showbiz in the sleepy Yorkshire Dales

While Welch is best remembered for her roles in such films as Fantastic Voyage and One Million Years B.C., as well as for her status as an international sex symbol, she is also well recalled in these parts for her fleeting involvement in the world of Yorkshire cricket, an association which held the nation spellbound in 1991.

In one of the greatest and most improbable celebrity comings-together of all time, Welch’s son, Damon, married the Yorkshire and England cricketer Fred Trueman’s daughter, Rebecca, with Raquel attending the wedding blessing at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire.

The happy couple had secretly married in Los Angeles the previous year, so this event was really for the respective families and the first time that the famous in-laws had come face-to-face.

To say that Raquel stole the show would be an understatement.

Her visit to the county sparked a media frenzy as Fleet Street’s finest descended on the Dales days in advance, tasked by their editors with finding and interviewing one of the world’s most famous and glamorous women.

In a move so audacious it was simply not considered, Welch based herself right under their noses in a room at the nearby and very prominent Devonshire Arms, as rumours circulated that she was holed up somewhere with a local aristocrat.

Unable to track her down, reporters resorted to tailing Rebecca and anyone else they thought might lead them to Welch, resulting in some circuitous car trips and cat-and-mouse tactics.

Although Rebecca didn’t welcome the press intrusion ahead of her big day, she wasn’t exactly coy about protecting her anonymity as her sister, Karen, hilariously related to me when I wrote a biography of Fred Trueman in 2011 (still available at fine bookstores everywhere, by the way).

“Rebecca was buying bridesmaid’s dresses for my girls in a little boutique in Skipton,” said Karen. “When we got to the shop, she said, ‘Right, I don’t want anyone to know who I am. I don’t want the press to find out I’m getting my dresses here. So keep your mouth shut, Karen. Don’t speak. I’ll do all the talking.’

“So I said, ‘OK, Becky.’

“So we get the dresses fitted and everything else and eventually the girl behind the counter said to her, ‘Can I take a name?’

“And Becky said, ‘Yes, it’s Rebecca Trueman-Welch. That’s Trueman as in Freddie and Welch as in Raquel.”

On the big day itself, attended by over 100 guests from the worlds of sport and showbusiness, it wasn’t the bride who arrived fashionably late, but Raquel.

“I am afraid we are terribly late,” cooed Raquel from behind dark glasses as she stepped from a chauffeur-driven Mercedes with an entourage of beefy bodyguards in tow.

“Gosh, isn’t Yorkshire beautiful,” she told reporters. “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s amazing, it’s like a poem.”

The service lasted 40 minutes and guests were treated to a six-course meal at the Devonshire Arms, where Fred Trueman footed the bill but brought his own wine.

He called Raquel “a little smasher” and she described him as “a lovely, lovely man”. Later, Trueman – never short of a quip or two – told friends that the police had accused him of breaking into Raquel’s bedroom the previous night and laying hands on her jewellery. “They found me guilty but insane,” joked Fred.

Raquel’s dress was a major talking point – a figure-hugging number with plunging neckline.

Some of the Trueman clan found it rather risque – not least Fred’s 87-year-old mother, Ethel, who had no hesitation in saying so.

As Fred’s sister, Flo, told me: “When Raquel turned up wearing that low-cut dress, Mum kept saying, ‘It’s not right, that, Flo. It’s not right.’

“Anyway, later on Raquel came over to speak to Mum and, straight out of the blue, Mum said, ‘You know, young lady, that’s not the kind of outfit to be wearing at a wedding blessing.’

“Raquel thought she was joking and said, ‘Now I know where Freddie gets his humour from.’ But Mum was deadly serious.”

Fred’s first wife, Enid, was even more forthcoming. “She completely ruined my daughter’s wedding,” she recalled. “I don’t think she ate a lettuce leaf at the reception."

But Rebecca stuck up for Raquel and believed that she copped some unfair flak from the press especially.

She told me: “The press were quite cruel to her in my opinion.

"Raquel certainly never did anything cruel to me. On the contrary, she was always very kind to me.

"I think everything got out of hand because the press took it out of hand. There was so much media attention around my dad and Raquel, it was ridiculous. Damon and I almost felt we were getting in the way.”

Within 15 months the marriage was over, Rebecca reportedly walking out of the couple’s Los Angeles flat.

As Fred Trueman put it in one of his most memorable one-liners: “That marriage didn’t last as long as my run-up.”