47 Fun Facts About Rudolph Valentino

What was Valentino's real surname?

Guglielmi was part of a name far too long for American ears, so he cut it down to a short stage name; he wanted to be Rodolpho, but the public insisted on spelling it Rudolph.

Valentino's father, a former cavalry captain, ran what kind of practice in Castellaneta?

Veterinary medicine was his father's trade after the cavalry; when malaria killed him in 1906, the unruly Rodolfo lost his sternest critic and was soon packed off to boarding school.

Valentino earned a diploma from an institute in Liguria in which subject?

Agriculture was his mother's idea once the naval academy had turned him down, and he did use the training: one of his first jobs in America was tending the grounds of a Long Island estate.

Which gift from Natacha Rambova did newspaper critics mock as proof that Valentino was unmanly?

A slave bracelet from Rambova stayed on his wrist whatever the papers said; when one editorial sneered at it, he replied that the wrist beneath it could 'snap a real fist into your sagging jaw'.

Where did the penniless Valentino sleep in New York once his money for a room ran out?

On benches in Central Park, washing at fire hydrants, only months after landing with $4,000 in his pocket: he had run through the lot.

Valentino got his start at Maxim's in New York as what kind of dancer?

A taxi dancer was hired like a cab, one dance at a time; the trade was a byword for gigolo, a label Valentino hated and his enemies never let him forget.

Valentino testified in Blanca de Saulles's 1916 divorce; what did she do to her ex-husband a year later?

She shot him dead in a quarrel over custody of their son, and a jury acquitted her; Valentino, already smeared in the press over the divorce, left New York for the West Coast.

Valentino's memorial service starts each August 23 at exactly 12:10 pm; what does that time mark?

The minute he died, in a New York hospital in 1926 at the age of 31; the mourning that followed was so extravagant that tribute songs became hits, one of them written by his first wife.

Which 1921 film made Valentino a star and set off a tango craze?

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse turned a bit-part villain into a star with a single dance scene, and its takings rescued a studio that had been close to bankruptcy.

In his 1921 breakthrough film, Valentino's character Julio dances the tango in a bar in which city?

Buenos Aires's waterfront dives are where Julio cuts in on a dancing couple and knocks the man flat; the tango was not in the novel and was written in to show off Valentino's dancing.

After his 1921 breakthrough enriched Metro, Valentino quit the studio over what?

A refused raise: Metro kept its new star on $350 a week and gave him a bit part in a B-picture, so within months he walked out to a rival studio, which made him a desert sheik and an idol.

What was Natacha Rambova's job when Valentino first met her?

A costume designer and art director for the star Alla Nazimova, Rambova barely glanced at the future great lover when they met; before long she was steering his career.

What is Jean Acker said to have done on her wedding night with Valentino?

Locked him out of their hotel room: he pounded on her door at the Hollywood Hotel in vain, and the marriage he later called 'a ridiculous tragedy' was over before it began.

In The Sheik, how does Valentino's desert chieftain begin his romance with the English Lady Diana?

He abducts her as she rides into the desert and carries her off to his camp; women flocked to the film, while many men mocked its hero as effete.

What is the profession of Valentino's character in Blood and Sand (1922)?

Bullfighter Juan Gallardo was a part he threw himself into, though he had been led to expect a shoot in Spain and got a Hollywood back lot instead; he still counted it among his best films.

Beyond the Rocks, lost for decades until a print surfaced in the Netherlands, paired Valentino with which Paramount queen?

Gloria Swanson died believing all but a minute of their one film together was gone; some twenty years later a print turned up among a Dutch collector's rusting film cans.

Why was Valentino jailed for bigamy days after marrying Natacha Rambova in Mexico in 1922?

His divorce was not yet final: California made the newly divorced wait a year, and he had married again within months. The pair had to live apart until they could remarry legally in 1923.

In which 1924 costume film did Valentino play a duke in powder and wig, a look critics called effeminate?

Monsieur Beaucaire was chosen for him by his wife, Natacha Rambova; he lived the part so fully, his manager recalled, that he played the courtly Frenchman at home, but audiences missed the dangerous lover.

At the height of his fame in 1922, Valentino declared what against his studio, Famous Players-Lasky?

A one-man strike: he refused his pay cheques and demanded better films, and the studio answered with an injunction that kept one of the biggest stars in pictures off the screen for well over a year.

Barred from films in 1923, Valentino toured America dancing to advertise what?

A beauty clay called Mineralava paid the couple to dance from city to city, with Rambova's complexion as the sales pitch; the adman behind the idea, George Ullman, became Valentino's manager.

The only recordings Valentino ever made for a record company, in 1923, capture him doing what?

Singing two songs, the 'Kashmiri Song' and the Spanish 'El Relicario', each linked to one of his hit films; the idol of the silent screen could sing, but the discs sat unreleased until after his death.

Which fashionable 1920s pursuit did Natacha Rambova draw Valentino into?

Spiritualism: the couple were regulars at seances, and Valentino came to believe he had a spirit guide of his own, a Native American he called Black Feather.

What condition did United Artists attach to Valentino's 1925 contract regarding his wife, Natacha Rambova?

She had no say in his films: the studio would sign the star only if his wife kept out, and once he accepted the terms the marriage cracked. Within months she had left him.

In 1994 the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld drew Valentino for which everyday American item?

A postage stamp, in a set of silent-film stars: an American honour for an immigrant who had filed his first citizenship papers but died before he could finish the process.

Valentino's 1925 comeback The Eagle was loosely based on a novel by which Russian writer?

Alexander Pushkin's novel Dubrovsky gave him a Russian Robin Hood, a wronged officer turned masked outlaw; clips of the film resurface in the video for Queen and David Bowie's 'Under Pressure'.

What did Valentino bring back from Europe in 1924 that newspapers across America disapproved of?

A beard, grown for a film that was never made, caused more excitement, his manager wrote, than battles that had changed nations: the public wanted its clean-shaven idol back.

In his final film, the 1926 sequel to his desert romance, Valentino played what?

Both father and son: he played the dashing young hero and the ageing sheik of the first film. When he died weeks after its premiere, the studio rushed extra prints into cinemas to meet the demand.

A 1926 Chicago Tribune editorial that enraged Valentino was prompted by what in a ballroom's men's room?

A pink-powder vending machine set the anonymous writer raging about 'Pink Powder Puffs' and asking why no one had drowned Valentino years ago; the star challenged him to a boxing match.

Which heavyweight champion refereed Valentino's rooftop boxing match with a New York sportswriter?

Jack Dempsey, who sometimes sparred with the actor, oversaw the bout; Valentino floored the far heavier writer, who said afterwards that the boy had 'a punch like a mule's kick'.

Valentino collapsed in August 1926 and underwent emergency surgery for what?

A perforated ulcer, which had passed for appendicitis; doctors still call that presentation 'Valentino's syndrome'. Infection set in after the operation, and within eight days he was dead.

The Evening Graphic called the dying Valentino's illness what?

A publicity stunt for his new film, said the paper, whose coverage was the wildest of all that week; the hospital denied it, and the hoax theory died with him, at 31.

Which actress, claiming to be his fiancée, collapsed in hysterics over Valentino's coffin?

She had installed an 11-foot bank of lilies spelling out her own name at the bier.

The funeral home hired actors to impersonate what at Valentino's lying-in-state?

A Fascist honour guard, supposedly sent by Mussolini, was the invention of the undertaker's press agent; by one account he also hired the anti-Fascists who turned up to chase the guards away.

Valentino lies in a crypt at Hollywood Forever Cemetery next to whom?

June Mathis, the screenwriter who had fought to cast him in his first starring role, lent the crypt as a stopgap; she died the next year, and the 'temporary' arrangement became permanent.

What does the 'Woman in Black' traditionally bring to Valentino's crypt each year?

A red rose, said Ditra Flame, the first to claim the role, was what Valentino once brought to her sickbed; the veiled visits also helped to inspire the country song 'Long Black Veil'.

Valentino's Beverly Hills home was called what?

Falcon Lair was named for The Hooded Falcon, a pet project that was never made; he lived there barely a year, and the tobacco heiress Doris Duke later died in the house.

Which ballet star played Valentino in Ken Russell's 1977 biopic?

Rudolf Nureyev, the Soviet-born ballet star who had defected to the West, took the part; Russell made no claim to accuracy, saying he could be 'as inaccurate as I want to'.

After their divorce, Valentino's first wife, Jean Acker, went to court for the right to use what?

The name Mrs. Valentino: she toured vaudeville under it, to his fury, yet the two made their peace in the last year of his life, and she wrote a hit song in his memory.

Valentino died in 1926, a year before which upheaval transformed Hollywood?

The coming of sound might have undone him too, critics think, given his thick accent; as one of his leading ladies put it, 'The biggest thing Valentino ever did was to die.'

In 1925 Valentino gave out his only 'medal' for acting to which star, for Beau Brummel?

John Barrymore never won an Oscar, so the Rudolph Valentino Medal, voted by film critics four years before the first Academy Awards, was the only prize he ever received for his screen work.

Valentino's break as an exhibition dancer came when Bonnie Glass hired him to replace which future Hollywood star?

Clifton Webb, later Oscar-nominated for Laura, had been Glass's partner; she took Valentino on at $50 a week, and soon the pair were dancing at the Winter Garden and round the Keith vaudeville houses.

Before which US president did Valentino dance in Washington, D.C., in his years as an exhibition dancer?

Woodrow Wilson watched from the audience, a night Valentino recalled with pride; by his manager's account the dancers took sixteen curtain calls for a waltz of their own devising.

Which caustic journalist advised Valentino to ignore a press attack on his manhood, then wrote tenderly of him?

H. L. Mencken told him to let 'the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion' and found him likeable and gentlemanly; a week after his death he wrote of a young man with wealth and fame who was 'very unhappy'.

What role did Valentino play in The Married Virgin, his first substantial screen part?

An Italian count, and a scheming one: early Hollywood saw the dark newcomer only as a 'heavy', casting him as villains and gangsters and never as the lover.

In which 1921 film did Valentino play the lovesick Armand opposite Alla Nazimova?

Camille was moved from the 1840s to jazz-age Paris and denied the lovers their traditional deathbed reunion: here Armand never comes back, and the heroine dies clutching the book he gave her.

Besides a keep-fit manual, what did Valentino publish in 1923?

A book of poems, Day Dreams: with a court order keeping him off the screen that year, the idol turned author, bringing out the verse and the keep-fit manual within months of each other.

Why did Italian authorities reject Valentino's offer to enlist during World War I?

A defect in his left eye kept him out of uniform; when rumour later branded him a slacker, he put off applying for US citizenship until Italy had formally cleared his name.