R.I.P. Donna Hill a.k.a. RudyFan

The small but hearty subculture of silent film lovers has lost a dear friend; the news just reached me by way of Thomas Gladysz of The Louise Brooks Society that Donna Hill has passed on (yesterday, I believe). Donna was the keeper of the Valentino flame, best known for her 2010 book Rudolph Valentino The Silent Idol: His Life in Photographs. She was known to be researching a second Valentino book as well as one on Dorothy Gish.

I was fortunate to get to spend some quality time with Donna during my trip to the west coast in 2019. She’d been an online pen pal, and I definitely regarded her as one of THE people to look up when I was out there. She generously treated me to lunch in San Francisco’s Chinatown at one of her favorite spots. I can’t remember what-all we talked about, except I seem to recall she was full of romantic local lore, and of course old Hollywood tidbits. I am doubly sorry she left so early since there were potential follow-up lunches in our future. I had promised her I’d return the favor by taking her out to New York’s Chinatown the next time she came to NYC. And I’m coming back to Frisco in late spring ’25 for book events; I most definitely planned to look her up.

Anyway, the sorrow in the silent cinema community is great. One measure of the lady’s worth is that nearly everyone who’s posting about her has a story just like mine, testimonials of her kindness and generosity — and many of those accounts stretch across decades.

Here is Donna’s blog, Strictly Vintage Hollywood. (Thanks, Farran Smith Nehme, for the reminder)

We wish Donna a smooth and swift transition to the OTHER universe of stars.