Rudy and Mae Murray in ‘The Big Little Person’ 1919.
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard and starred his then-wife and muse Mae Murray. Rudy was credited as M. Rodolpho De Valentina, he had a supporting role and the film is now considered lost.
Rudy & Natacha at the Croydon Aviation Field (Boarding a flight to Paris-Le Bourget), London, August 1923.
(Croydon was the first airport in the world to introduce air traffic control. In 1923 flights to Berlin Tempelhof Airport began, and the airport became the operating base for Imperial Airways, remembered in the road name Imperial Way on the site today. Croydon was where regular international passenger services began, initially using converted wartime bombers, and the Croydon-Le Bourget route soon became the busiest in the world.)
From Rudy’s Private Diary:
“We left London by motor, and I made head for Croydon, the aviation field. I had done considerable aviating before the war, and so it was, in a sense, no new experience for me. Excepting that I had never used the closed machine, as it were. I mean, I like sitting out with the pilot, the winds of all the heavens blowing on you, free, disembodied, as near a flighted bird as man can be. Sitting as we did on this trip, in the stuffy enclosure of a tonneau effect with some eight or ten other people (not to mention the four dogs) took the very essence of the sport out of the flight for me. Now and then some of the passengers would be affected with a degree, mild or otherwise, of airsickness, and that took a great part of romance out of the trip as well.”
