Rudolph Valentino: The Early Years, .
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Villalobos, Jeanine Therese, PUBLISHER: Proquest, Umi Dissertation Publishing, This dissertation is a work of creative nonfiction that documents the life of silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino (ne Rodolfo Guglielmi) from his birth in to . It presents a detailed account of his childhood in Italy's deep south, through his boarding school days and the unsettled adolescence that prompted his emigration to the United States in . It follows his debut as an entertainer and describes the murky circumstances that led him to abandon New York. The narrative then follows the career and personal life of Valentino in his early years in Hollywood, ending with his disastrous marriage to Jean Acker just before he achieves stardom in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The impetus for this project was the discovery of hundreds of documents in the possession of the Valentino family. This new information brings more complexity and nuance to our understanding of Valentino. This biography situates its subject within the context of the southern Italian middle-classes at the turn of the twentieth century; the New York dance craze in the s; perceptions of Italian immigrants in the United States; and the early Hollywood film colony. Centrally, Valentino is considered as a liminal figure: He is caught between Old World values and the values of Jazz Age Hollywood; between the allure of glamorous decadence and the yearning for a stable, purposeful family and work life; between, as a dark-skinned Italian cast in exotic roles, ethnic identities; between the desire for an old-fashioned, maternal wife and an independent, career-minded New Woman. Valentino's ambivalences and contradictions uncannily mirror the tensions in the culture at large as it struggled to shed Victorian values and ideas. The dissertation also explores how Valentino's story is at odds with the familiar American Dream narrative. Persistent biographical misrepresentations of Valentino illustrate the force of this cultural myth to homogenize individual immigrant experience. For Valentino, America did not represent an escape from poverty so much as an escape from the restraints of his dull provincial world. Accordingly, this work also examines the themes of self-invention and imposture.