Hudson Rock life and biography

Hudson Rock, born November 17, 1925 in Winnetka, Illinois, United States - died October 4, 1985 in Beverly Hills, California, United States was an American actor, Academy Award–nominated actor who dominated the box-office charts in the 1960s, gaining particular popularity for a string of risqué romantic comedies that earned him the title "king of the sex comedy."

Hudson was born Roy Harold Scherer, Jr., the only child of Roy Harold Scherer, Sr., an auto mechanic, and Katherine ("Kay") Wood, a homemaker and, later, a telephone operator. Hudson's parents divorced when he was four years old, and his mother was remarried to Wallace Fitzgerald, a former Marine Corps officer, in 1932. Fitzgerald adopted Hudson, whose legal name became Roy Fitzgerald. That marriage also ended in divorce. Hudson had no siblings.

After graduating from New Trier High School (Winnetka, Illinois) in 1943, Hudson served in the navy from 1944 to 1946 and after his discharge moved to Los Angeles, where he worked a string of odd jobs while trying to break into the film industry. The talent agent Henry Willson is credited with discovering the blandly named Roy Fitzgerald and giving him the more macho sobriquet of Rock Hudson—a name the actor never liked. Willson introduced Hudson to the film director Raoul Walsh, who signed Hudson to a personal contract. Walsh gave the actor his first film role, a bit part in Fighter Squadron (1948).

In 1949 Walsh sold Hudson's contract to Universal Pictures, where the actor remained for the next sixteen years. During the 1950s Hudson gradually rose through the ranks of Universal's stable of contract players, starting out with minor parts in "B" movies and working his way up to lead roles in melodramas. He earned his only Academy Award nomination for the big-screen adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel Giant in 1956. Hudson's last film of the 1950s remade his image and set the tone for the remainder of his career. Pillow Talk (1959) was Hudson's first screen comedy and the first of three films to pair him with Doris Day. The film earned rave reviews and several Oscar nominations. More important to Hudson, it widened his box-office appeal. Moviegoers learned that the stalwart hero of melodramas and adventure films also had a flair for comedy.

In Pillow Talk, Hudson played a charming womanizer who employs duplicitous tactics to win the heart of Day, a chaste career girl. The fast-paced script was filled with witty banter and sexual innuendo. The term "sex comedy" was coined to describe this type of film, and before long Hudson was the genre's reigning king. He tried to replicate Pillow Talk's winning formula in a string of similar comedies, including two follow-up vehicles with Day—Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964). He frolicked with Gina Lollobrigida in Come September (1961) and Strange Bedfellows (1965), Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport? (1964), and Leslie Caron in A Very Special Favor (1965).

Hudson's popularity skyrocketed during the 1960s, his face adorning countless movie magazines. He reportedly received ten thousand fan letters a month, and Universal subsidized the actor's fan club at a cost of $10,000 a year. He won numerous popularity polls and motion picture exhibitor awards (given by theater owners to stars who command the biggest box-office receipts), including United Theatre Owners' Star of the Year (1961), Theatre Owners of America's Actor of the Year (1961), three Golden Globe Awards, and five Bambi Awards as Germany's most popular male star. The Motion Picture Herald and Independent Film Journal both named Hudson the top moneymaking actor of 1960. That same year he was one of the first actors to be immortalized with a star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame.

Though his screen comedies had propelled him to the top of his profession, Hudson continued to do dramatic roles—a sheriff standing down the gunfighter Kirk Douglas in The Last Sunset (1961) and an atheist who finds God in The Spiral Road (1964). These vehicles proved less popular with moviegoers and reviewers alike. As one critic of The Spiral Road noted, "His devotees are apt to wish he was back romping with Doris Day." By the mid-1960s Hudson had grown tired of romantic comedy and told reporters that he would rather leave that type of role to Cary Grant.

In 1965 Hudson's contract with Universal expired, and he decided to become a free agent. The same year he formed his own production company, Gibraltar Productions. Feeling pigeonholed in comedy, he sought out dramatic roles once again, beginning with Seconds (1966), the grim cautionary tale of a banker (John Randolph) who trades his aging body for a younger model (Hudson). Though praised by critics, the film was a commercial failure, a fact that hurt Hudson, who considered it one of his best. Hudson's efforts to break out of the comedy mold continued with Ice Station Zebra (1968), a spy thriller that cast him as a submarine commander desperate to beat the Russians to the North Pole to retrieve a film capsule containing satellite photos of missile locations. In the Civil War drama The Undefeated (1969), Hudson took second billing to John Wayne. Wayne played a Yankee colonel, Hudson a Confederate colonel. The war has just ended and both are headed for Mexico. Circumstances along the way force the former enemies into an unlikely alliance.

By the 1970s Hudson's film career was on the decline, and he turned to television, starring in the mystery series McMillan and Wife (renamed McMillan when "wife" Susan Saint James left the series) from 1971 to 1977. He also starred in several made-for-television movies and miniseries, most notably Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (1980). In his last years Hudson's career was eclipsed by the media furor surrounding the revelation that the actor, who had labored to keep his homosexuality a secret, had AIDS. Hudson succumbed to the disease at his Beverly Hills home in Los Angeles. He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea.

Hudson had been married briefly, from 1955 to 1958, to Phyllis Gates, who had been his agent's secretary. The marriage likely was arranged to squelch rumors of Hudson's homosexuality. The actor had no children. Though Hudson achieved critical acclaim—as well as an Oscar nomination—for his dramatic roles, it was his metamorphosis into a comedic farceur that made him one of the most bankable actors of the 1960s. Considered classics, his comedies with Doris Day have been much emulated by younger generations of filmmakers. Ironically, Hudson never felt fully comfortable in these roles and avoided them completely once he became a free agent, a choice that coincided with the decline of his film career.

Rock Hudson and Sara Davidson, Rock Hudson: His Story (1986), was written by Davidson with Hudson's cooperation, although the star was already dying and reportedly was incoherent for much of the six weeks that Davidson worked with him. Other full-length biographies of Hudson include Mark Bego, Rock Hudson, Public and Private (1986); Phyllis Gates (Hudson's wife of three years), My Husband, Rock Hudson (1987); and Tom Clark, Rock Hudson, Friend of Mine (1990). Brenda Scott Royce, Rock Hudson: A Bio-Bibliography (1995), provides a comprehensive analysis of Hudson's career.

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