Valentino Award For Irons
The Evening Standard (London)
February 25, 1999
Jeremy Irons, Claudia Cardinale and Bernardo Bertolucci were presented with Rudolph Valentino awards for lifetime achievement in London tonight.
THE RUDOLPH Valentino Awards came to London for the first time last night. The black-tie shindig and 25th film award ceremony, compered by Griff Rhys Jones at Park Lane's Grosvenor House, saw Bernardo Bertolucci, Jeremy Irons and Claudia Cardinale receive honours for best director, actor and actress respectively.
"I did not understand the connection between Valentino and myself," Bertolucci admitted on receiving his award, "so I asked my wife. She said: 'It could only be the Italian connection.'"
Irons was similarly flummoxed: "I called a friend in Connecticut and said: 'The Italians want to give me the Rudolph Valentino Award.' She said: 'Not for your dress sense, surely.'" Irons emerged from a short-list which also included Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day-Lewis and Ewan McGregor. Past winners include Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Gerard Depardieu, and Francis Ford Coppola.
The awards are sponsored by the Italian prime minister.
Among the party guests were Martine McCutcheon and Barbara Windsor, catching up on old times at EastEnders, as well as Oscar-winning film director Anthony Minghella and social chameleon Boy George.
Overall the party, in aid of the health charity Sane, was a glamorous if disjointed affair. As Irons told me: "Only the Italians could have organised an evening like this."