No one really knew what to make of Rudolph Valentino. Arguably the most famous screen lover of all time, he was swooned over as an “earthy tiger” and denigrated as a “pink powder puff.” A sportsman and fitness buff—Jack Dempsey was a pal—he also endorsed beauty products and allowed himself to be photographed as a nude, panpipe-playing “faun.” Italian-born, he found stardom playing sheikhs, gauchos, rajas, and similar exotics both perfumed and “savage.” As Emily Leider writes in Dark Lover, her rich and definitive Valentino biography, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next month, “He raised disturbing questions about just how decorative and beautiful a man should properly be.” (Funny, these are questions we’re still grappling with, or at least we were last time I got a pectoral implant.) Watch his films today—those few that survive—and it’s not hard to see what the fuss was all about. He was famously directed to overact in his most iconic role, The Sheik (1921), but still, his physical charisma is palpable. Leider’s book details a messy and often lonely personal life (two failed marriages, one never consummated) and a career that even for Hollywood held more than its share of frustrations. Valentino himself was conflicted about his screen persona. “No more posing Apollo stuff for me,” he told a reporter in 1925. “If any producer comes to me with a sheik part I am going to murder him!” Instead, he signed on for The Son of the Sheik. He died a year later from an infection following surgery for appendicitis; he was 31. As The New York Times noted, VALENTINO PASSES WITH NO KIN AT HIS SIDE. It’s a sad story and, in its broadest strokes, a timeless one. Leider tells it with grace, wit, and empathy.