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HUDSON, ROCK (Roy Scherer 1925–1985). American actor.
While he was one
of Hollywood's biggest attractions, Hudson's nearest approach to science
fiction came in the best of his lightweight comedies, Lover Come Back,
wherein one plot element is an amazing intoxicating pill, invented to serve as
the nonexistent product that advertiser Hudson had inadvertently promoted. But
his proper introduction to the genre came in Seconds, where he portrayed
an elderly man refashioned into a young man with a different identity who
nevertheless grows dissatisfied with his inauthentic new life. Still, Hudson's
greatest performance could not make John
FRANKENHEIMER's
downbeat drama a box-office success, and the actor drifted into westerns and
action movies, like the routine Ice Station Zebra, before settling into
a long-running television series, McMillan and Wife (1971-1977).
As his film
appearances grew rarer, Hudson found himself miscast as a brilliant scientist
in Embryo (just at the moment when film producers were realizing that
handsome hunks could not credibly portray brilliant scientists), but even a
better-chosen protagonist could not have salvaged this dubious variant on the
Frankenstein story involving the artificial creation of a beautiful woman who
acts like a monster. He was more effective in two overlooked television movies:
in The Martian Chronicles, his emotional numbness was perfectly
appropriate as a response to Ray
BRADBURY's incohesive source material, and in World
War III, he was very persuasive as a weak vice president, accidentally
elevated to the presidency, who cannot prevent unfolding events from leading to
a nuclear holocaust. But his career was put on hold by quintuple heart bypass
surgery, and in a few years he was dead.
I have
scrupulously avoided any mention of the fact that Hudson was a deeply closeted
gay man, outed only as he was dying of AIDS, because I do not believe it is
relevant to any evaluation of his acting career. As was not the case with
another gay actor, Thomas TRYON,
I can detect no evidence that Hudson was troubled by his
double life of romancing women on the set by day and frequenting gay bars by
night, or that he sought out or was especially inspired by roles that related
to his personal situation. It is fanciful, I think, to theorize that Hudson
relished the experience of Seconds because he was playing an attractive
young man who was not what he seemed, or that he was attracted to Embryo
because its story embodied the homosexual fantasy of having a child without a
woman involved. Rather, Hudson enjoyed both aspects of his life, feeling no
inner torments about their disparate rewards, and one does not require invented
autobiographical resonances to value Hudson's few, but memorable, contributions
to science fiction film.
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