Natacha Rambova (January 19, 1897 – June 5, 1966) was an American film costume and set designer, best known for her marriage to Rudolph Valentino. Although they shared many interests such as art, poetry and spiritualism, his colleagues felt that she exercised too much control over his work and blamed her for several expensive flops. In later life, she continued her spiritualist activities, as well as studying Egyptology.
[on her separation from Rudolph Valentino] He knew what I was when I married him. I have been working since I was 17. Homes and babies are all very nice, but you can't have them and a career as well. I intended, and intend, to have a career and Valentino knew it. If he wants a housewife, he'll have to look again.
2
[on her first trip to Egypt in January 1936] I felt as if I had at last returned home. The first few days I was there I couldn't stop the tears streaming from my eyes. It was not sadness, but some emotional impact from the past- a returning to a place once loved after too long a time.
3
[on her first meetings with Rudolph Valentino] It wasn't love at first sight. I think it was good comradeship more than anything else.
4
[on her breakup with Rudolph Valentino] With butlers, maids and the rest, what work is there for a housewife? I won't be a parasite. I won't sit home and twiddle my fingers, waiting for a husband who goes on the lot at 5:00 a.m. and gets home at midnight and receives mail from girls in Oshkosh and Kalamazoo.
5
I always told my mother that I would see to it that I would never have any children.
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Fact
1
Great granddaughter of Heber C. Kimball, one of the founders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon).
2
In 2009 her 1926 memoir was republished as, "Rudolph Valentino: A Wife's Memories of an Icon".
3
Greta Garbo once expressed a desire to meet her. Garbo called her 'Mata Hari (1934)_ costar, Ramon Novarro, asking for an introduction. The actor asked Natacha to his apartment but made the mistake of inviting a number of other people, thereby transforming the rendezvous into a reception. When Garbo arrived at Novarro's door and saw the crowd inside, she turned and fled. Thus the two women, who had similar faces, never met, but they did have a mutual acquaintance in the screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta.
4
In 1925 she staged a media event when she traveled from Los Angeles to Paris to pose for photographer James E. Abbe at famous clothing designer Paul Poiret's salon. She modeled a pearl-embroidered white velvet gown and a chinchilla cloak, and declared Poiret her favorite couturier.
5
Gwe reasons for not wanting kids was that she loved her career so much she didn't think she would be a fit enough mother and give her children the attention they needed. She did indeed have a fondness for children, and would often visit her young cousins.
6
Was approached several times to appear in a leading film role, since she was extremely beautiful and photogenic. She refused many offers and relented only once, for When Love Grows Cold (1926). She was horrified when the original title, "Do Clothes Make the Woman?", was changed and she was billed as Mrs. Rudolph Valentino, since the film was released during her divorce from him.
7
In 1951 she turned down interviews and threatened to sue Columbia Pictures if they portrayed her in a biographical film they were making about Rudolph Valentino (Valentino (1951)).
8
She thought the script for Rudolph Valentino's film The Sheik (1921) was trash but loved him enough to design his costumes for the film, paint a portrait of him in costume, and even appeared as an extra.
9
She and Rudolph Valentino owned and lived with a lion cub named Zela, two Great Danes, a large gopher snake and a green monkey.
10
She designed and gave Rudolph Valentino a gift of a platinum slave bracelet, which he took to his grave.
11
Myrna Loy gave Natacha credit for discovering her when she was cast in Rambova's film What Price Beauty? (1925).
12
Is credited with giving legendary MGM costume designer Adrian his first experience in working in films with The Hooded Falcon (1924). She would use him on several of her films.
13
The niece of legendary interior designer Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendle).
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