Although The Hunkies is devoted to the young and hot, we don’t want you to think we’re only about ‘dem yoot’. Well, there is something of diminishing hotness after a certain age, but that doesn’t mean we don’t like the oldsters – after all, Tom Cruise is knocking fifty nowadays and Brad Pitt ain’t no spring chicken.

This article will look back over the years at some of the oldsters when they were young and impossibly, smokingly, H-O-T HOT. Most of these guys are no longer with us, and one is probably either playing Party Poker or scrabble on his porch in his slippers, but back in the day they were if not hunkie at least very very handsome.

The man who invented hotness for the screen has to be Rudolph Valentino. Born with the marvellously over the top name, Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla, in Italy and dying at the age of only 31 in 1926 having made less than 40 films (this was when many films were under 20 mins). Rudy embodied smouldering – imagine a candle that has just been put out and believe that the wick never stops smoking and sizzling. That was our man.

In the 30s, it’ll have to be Clark Gable. Sure there are lots of others we could choose, but when it comes to sheer exuberant romance Gone With The Wind will be watched for hundreds of years in the future and without the nonchalant handsomeness of Rhett Butler, the film wouldn’t be the same.

By the fifties the world had changed and become more cynical, so Marlon Brando has to be the hottest If ever there was a misunderstood, tight tee-shirt wearing, hot hottie, it is Marlon in the full bloom of youth in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Our final ‘Hot but Oldie’ is definitely off the beaten track but bear with us. Peter Fonda – yes, while his sister was getting all the attention in Barbarella, Peter was swimming around a sun drenched pool in the desert in Easy Rider. Yes, if you haven’t seen it, you’ve got a treat. Pure hunkie poetry.