Word: hudson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...these days I'm going to have a lot to tell," Rock Hudson once promised a friend. The day never came, and when Hudson died of AIDS at his home in Beverly Hills last week, his story, as he alone might have told it, died with him. But it was clear that the role he played in life was more dramatic, and infinitely sadder, than any of the parts he had assumed in 65 movies and several TV series. For 37 years he had led a double life: in public he was a romantic star, adored by millions of women...
...those plot twists that any screenwriter would have rejected as too improbable to consider, in the last weeks of his life Hudson became perhaps the most famous homosexual in the world, a man whose fatal illness belatedly focused public attention on the disease that killed him. If he had succumbed to a heart attack, his death would probably have occasioned only a brief notice; because he was the most celebrated known victim of AIDS, it became a significant event...
...keeping with his all-American image, Hudson, 59, was born in the heartland, in Winnetka, Ill. His mother was a telephone operator, and his father, Roy Scherer, was an automobile mechanic who left the family when his son was a child. When his mother remarried, little Roy assumed his stepfather's surname, Fitzgerald. After that, his boyhood was so normal and wholesome that one of his high school chums was later to recall, "It looked like apple pie and ice cream to me." Roy saw wartime service as a Navy airplane mechanic, then headed west to Hollywood. He had once...
...looking. Can you act?" asked Willson. "No," said the young man. "What did you say, feller?" asked the incredulous agent. "I said, no, I can't act." To which Willson replied: "Good. I think I can do something for you. Sit down." Willson transformed Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson and secured him an apprenticeship in one of the biggest film factories, Universal Pictures. Fighter Squadron (1948) was his first film. During the next six years, 25 others followed, like The Iron Man and Air Cadet. The studio was his school. By the time his first big picture, The Magnificent Obsession...
...actor who had been inspired by Hall's breaststroke never turned into Laurence Olivier, never attempted the challenging parts taken by such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, who reached deep into themselves to express their characters. Hudson knew his limitations, and what he did, he did well. One of his most successful roles was that of the Texas patriarch in Giant (1956), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His real talent, however, was for light romantic comedy, beginning with Pillow Talk (1959), in which he was first teamed with Doris Day, and ending with...