Rudolph Valentino

Italian-born film actor who became the first great male sex symbol of the cinema. Born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella in 1895, he emigrated to the United States and worked as a dancer and bit player before his breakout role in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). The Sheik (1921) made him a sensation, and his dark, smoldering presence provoked a kind of mass hysteria few performers have matched. He died suddenly of peritonitis in 1926 at the age of thirty-one, his final film, The Son of the Sheik, released two weeks later.