RUDOLPH VALENTINO: The Tragic Life of a SİLENT SCREEN IDOL

THE ITALIAN-BORN STAR LONGED FOR LASTING HAPPINESS, BUT TRUE LOVE ALWAYS ELUDED HIM

- Fortune Benatar

Before he lapsed into a coma, matinee idol Rudolph Valentino made a joke to his doctor. “I’m afraid we won’t go fishing together,” he said.

The unexpected death of the 31-year-old silent-screen star from an uncontrolled infection rocked the world in the summer of 1926. Hundreds of New York police officers were called in to keep thousands of fans from stopping the progression of his funeral cortege to the Actors’ Chapel at St. Malachy’s for a Mass attended by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Gloria Swanson, among others. “People turned out, fighting just to see him one last time,” says Allan Ellenberger, author of The Valentino Mystique: The Death and Afterlife of the Silent Film Idol. “We don’t see that anymore.”