Tall, dark and handsome, during the 1950s and 1960s Rock Hudson was the quintessential Hollywood ideal of American masculinity; an ideal that was to be questioned and ultimately undermined during the years to follow.
The often lurid posthumous accounts of his private life and the circumstances surrounding his death from AIDS related illness have tended to overshadow consideration of his career as an actor. Consequently Hudson has eluded the critical attention afforded to many of his contemporaries.
I’m writing a book for the new BFI series of studies of major film stars. My aim is to reassess Rock Hudson and to identify the specific iconographic qualities and the nature of his performances that together made him one of the most popular and successful film stars of his generation.
