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Rock Hudson (1925 - 1985)
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 Rock
Hudson by Brenda Scott Royce
Rock Hudson rose to stardom as the virile hero
of adventure films, and he then gained a flurry of female fans by
starring in melodramas, like Magnificent Obsession. He earned an
Oscar nomination for his role in Giant, starred in successful
romantic comedies, and had a productive television and stage
career. This book provides full information about his many
performances and charts his life and career up to his death from
AIDS.
 Seconds
(1966)
Hudson stars, in arguably his best screen
performance, as the "after" part of a bizarre
transformational experiment. A middle-aged businessman, tired of
his life, job and wife, goes to a mysterious organization which
promises to remake him, to give him a second chance. After
extensive surgery, he wakes up with a new face and identity, that
of an artist. Settling into his new life, he eventually realizes
that he will never find the happiness which he thought was waiting
around the corner. So he returns to the organization for another
try, with unfortunate results. This bizarre but simple story is
itself transformed into a masterpiece of paranoia and horror by
Frankenheimer's taut direction and James Wong Howe's dazzling,
canted-angled, black-and-white cinematography. Disturbing but
brilliant, Seconds always remains plausible, its
proposition desirable enough to make it seem very real.
Rock Hudson Filmography:
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From The Knitting Circle
Excerpt:
The writer Armistead Maupin met Rock Hudson in
1976 when he was introduced by Jack Coates who had been Rock
Hudson's lover for four or five years. Armistead Maupin then
became an occasional lover. There was much talk about a biography
of Rock Hudson being written in which his true story would be
told, but it was apparent that it would not be allowed to happen.
In Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City Michael
Tolliver links up with a closeted macho icon referred to as Blank
Blank. This has been seen as a thinly disguised representation of
Rock Hudson. In fact Armistead Maupin claims that he changed
details to avoid the character being recognised as Rock Hudson and
that it was not meant to be about a specific person but rather
about a type.
In 1985 Rock Hudson began to show signs of
serious illness and there were rumours that he had AIDS. In fact
he had been diagnosed with AIDS on 5th. June, 1984 but when the
signs of illness became apparent his publicity staff and doctors
told the public that he had liver cancer. It was on 25th. July
1985 when a spokesperson for Rock Hudson finally acknowledged that
he had AIDS. This had an enormous impact on the public perception
of AIDS. Here was the first famous white and wealthy person who
was a Republican who had been a symbol of heterosexuality and who
had been struck down with a disease that so many people had tried
to ignore...
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From GayGate.com
Excerpt:
The news was profoundly shocking to many people:
although thousands had already died of AIDS, Hudson was the first
person whose case galvanized the threat of the epidemic in the
collective consciousness. The impact was twofold: first, no one
was immune to AIDS, and second, intertwined with that, if manly
heart-throb Rock Hudson could turn out to be gay, then who else
might not be gay as well? It was all confusing and threatening and
sad. Newspapers obsessed over the contrast between earlier images
of the handsome, virile Hudson and the gaunt, disease-ravaged face
in recent photographs. It is of course deplorable that these
convulsions ever had to take place: that it took someone of Rock
Hudson's popularity to legitimize concern about a public health
crisis of the magnitude of AIDS. But at the same time, it is
undeniable that Hudson's plight was directly responsible for both
increased public awareness and increased governmental spending on
the epidemic...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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