Aristocrats, Acrobats, Latin Lovers, and Waiters: Italians in American Silent Cinema

This chapter focuses on Italian actors who left their native Italy for Hollywood; more specifically it focuses on the men. The female stars—le dive, the divas—who were a fundamental component of Italian silent cinema, did not join the (small) stream of Italian film actors heading for Hollywood in the interwar period. One might argue that the reasons for the female performers staying behind are both biographical and cultural. One the one hand, the crisis of the Italian cinema in the 1920s perhaps didn’t face them as much as their male counter parts—several were married to their producers