The serenade of a thousand years ago. The song of a hushed lip. Lives forever in the glass of today. Wherein we see the reflection of it. If we but brush away. The cobwebs of a doubting faith.
I read words he wrote; I watch movies he made; I listen to music about him. It has been one hundred years since his passing and the grief I feel is still fresh.
I could not have known him and yet, after all the years I have spent reading about him, looking at his photographs, watching his films, and trying to separate the real man from the legend that grew around him, there are times when I feel as though I did know him.
That may sound strange. How can we feel that we know someone we never met? Perhaps it happens when we spend enough time following the fragments of his life he left behind in moving images in which we can still watch him smile, walk across the room, become angry, fall in love, dance the tango and wish his dance partner were us. There are photographs, interviews, newspaper stories, and recollections from people of a bygone era who personally knew him. Yet a century later those fragments remain.
Rudolph Valentino has been dead for 100 years and during that century other people have continually rewritten him with truth or lies. While using fiction to remake fact and making money off this.
A century separates us; I care about the man who once occupied a now empty space. When 23 August comes around and I know others may see nothing more than the anniversary of the death of an old movie star. I feel something different. I feel the absence of someone I never met. He’s still in my heart and after all these years I will never apologise and never forget.
All About Rudolph Valentino 
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