The Latin Lover was the first male acting type in the history of filmmaking whose behavior and destiny are set through his love relations with a woman, hence ‘lover’ though, as the type was depicted in the beginning, the term ‘seducer’ would be more suitable. Major characteristics describing the type include:
appearance; he is always handsome or, for the reigning standard of the period, different or atypically looking.
behavior; the way he conquers women, using focused, sharp glare, and certain mannerism characterized by outbursts of passion, dancing, etc.
type of roles; he is usually a romantic, exotic hero and foreigner, mostly a historical person or character in literature, often a victim of an intrigue which insinuates the doomed affair.
genre; mostly melodramas, and if it happens to be some other type of a movie, it must have melodramatic overtones.
When he appeared, the Latin Lover was opposed to the absolutely dominant type of male character in Hollywood at the time, a man of action, who represented a fighter for justice, freedom or some other cause. At the same time, the Latin Lover was the first distinct non-American type. It was the result of several factors: crisis of faith in the supremacy of a male as a consequence of the horrors of World War I, growing female emancipation but also Hollywood’s effort to conquer the film markets of Europe, whose audience was deemed more refined at the time. Due to the non-American attributes of the type and a fact that a noticeable number of European actors moved their careers to Hollywood, some film historians, like Enno Patalas, prefer the term ‘stranger’ instead of a ‘lover’.
Origin
Because of the American idea what a Latin Lover should look like, initial representatives of the type were indeed of Mediterranean or Latin American origin. The first was the Italian-born actor Rudolph Valentino, for whom the term Latin Lover was created. Director George Fitzmaurice, who directed Valentino in several of his movies, was very important for the launching of Latin Lover character. Valentino is universally considered as the supreme representative of the type in film history. A symbol of what a lover should be and look like in the 1920s, his enormous popularity was enhanced by his unusual personal life and the fact that he was the first male star whose private life was compared to those of the characters he played. The Valentino myth was sealed with his premature death at the age of 31. Later, the term included Mexican-born actor Ramon Novarro and other typecast actors followed, like Maurice Chevalier, Ricardo Cortez, Antonio Moreno, Gilbert Roland, Jack La Rue, Rod La Rocque, Charles Boyer, Victor Mature, Frank Sinatra, Robert Alda, and Adolphe Menjou, the first who brought a certain measure of cynicism to the type. As the Latin lovers rapidly gained popularity with the audience, the ‘non-Latin’ characteristics increased, so the variations of the type developed, which made the use of ‘stranger’ instead of ‘lover’ more acceptable. In Great Britain, the originator was Ivor Novello and Ronald Colman added the Englishness, creating the type of an English gentleman. Central European and local German flavors were presented by Erich von Stroheim and Conrad Veidt, respectively, while a very popular French exemplar was Ivan Mosjoukine. When it comes to the American actors in the later silent period, almost without any competition from other fellow actors, the type was embodied by John Barrymore and John Gilbert. In the sound period, most popular American actors of the type were William Powell, Fredric March, Melvyn Douglas and commercially extremely successful Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power. The ‘French lover cliché’ type was created by Charles Boyer, while popular British actors, prior to World War II, include Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Robert Donat, David Niven and James Mason. Britons in general added much more realism to the type, while Mason represented a bit of a ‘sadistic’ derivative. Massimo Girotti was an Italian version. Though actors like Douglas Fairbanks and Anthony Quinn are sometimes placed in this category, they actually belonged to the adventurer or the swashbuckler type.
