The rise to stardom of the original Hollywood “Latin lover”, Rudolph Valentino, is a remarkable one. I’m pretty sure nobody who knew him in his childhood could have had the slightest inkling of what lay in store for him: he was born in 1895 in Castellaneta, at the top of the heel of Italy, to a captain of cavalry in the Italian army and a French mother. Although even as a boy he was known for his exceptional looks, he did poorly at school, squeezed a certificate out of agricultural college in Genoa, and couldn’t find work. As with so many others, he departed for the United States, and was processed at Ellis Island in 1913, aged 18.
Rodolfo, as he was then (real name: Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella), sought work bussing tables at various New York restaurants. He was fired several times, but eventually one skill that he did have – dancing – secured him work as a “taxi dancer” (hired to dance with customers) at Maxim’s Restaurant-Cabaret. He befriended a Chilean heiress there and became entangled in something of a scandal which motivated him to leave town, joining a travelling musical which took him to the West Coast.
It was on the West Coast that things started happening for Rodolfo; he was encouraged to seek screen roles and his “exotic” looks led him to win bit parts in several movies. His big break, though, came when he won a lead role in the 1921 silent movie, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which became a commercial and critical success and catapulted him to stardom. He was marketed as the “Latin lover” with a new stage name, and the movies The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, and The Son of the Sheik all followed, each one cementing Valentino’s reputation and star quality.
He soon became the archetypal sex symbol of the silent movie era, alongside the fair-complexioned, all-American male leads Wallace Reid and Douglas Fairbanks Junior, as well as the other contemporary hearththrob matinée idol of foreign extraction, Tokyo-born Sessue Hayakawa (who decades later would appear as Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai). Valentino’s status as a cultural icon was sealed in 1926 by his early death from peritonitis, aged just 31. Mass hysteria ensued, and indeed the events of Valentino’s funeral are a story in themselves (100,000 lined the streets to pay their respects, but so much disorder broke out that 100 mounted NYPD officers were needed to restore order).
Here is a montage of Valentino footage in various publicity shots and off-screen scenarios – if your only image of him is in costume and make-up (perhaps as “the Sheik”), then you might find this quite compelling and worth viewing to get an insight into the “real” Valentino and why the women swooned…feast your eyes!
