9/18/2023 0 Comments Death saved my life release dateHudson’s on-screen work, however, told only one side of his story. His films with Day - “Pillow Talk” (1959), “Lover Came Back” (1961), “Send Me No Flowers” (1964) - “constantly give him a character that is pretending to be gay or effeminate when, really, he’s this straight, butch guy, but he’s doing that to trick, to maybe get her into bed.” Nevertheless, as time went on, there seemed to be a more deliberate creative choice to play into the duality of Hudson’s public and private selves on the big screen, Kijak said. Given that Hudson was generally well liked and well regarded among his peers, many of his co-stars, including Doris Day and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as the people who had him under contract at Universal Studios, protected his potentially career-ending secret. At the behest of his notorious agent, Henry Willson, who was known for grooming his younger male clients to maintain a more macho image, Hudson married Willson’s secretary, Phyllis Gates, in 1955 - a union that lasted only three years - but questions continued to swirl about the actor’s sexuality, according to the film. “I could have done a lot more of it,” Kijak said, “but the idea was to create this sort of fantasy space within film, so that he could be himself in a movie of the ’50s and ’60s and be a gay man in that world.”īut that isn’t to say that Hollywood was completely oblivious to Hudson’s love life. Taking a page from the 1992 film “ Rock Hudson’s Home Movies” - a quasi-documentary, or “ essay film,” in which director Mark Rappaport playfully mined the queer subtext and double entendres from Hudson’s movies - Kijak said he wanted to look for “deeper, broader connections” in his work, but he wanted these connections “speaking to all aspects of his life, not just his queerness.” In 2020, Kijak, who had recently directed the four-part HBO Max docuseries “Equal” about the fight for LGBTQ rights, was approached by his producing partners about helming a new Hudson film called “Accidental Activist.” Believing that the descriptor “could be a little misleading” for the scope of their project and wanting to respect the AIDS activists who were “on the front lines, fighting for their lives, from the very beginning,” Kijak said he elected to change the title to “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed,” after Hudson’s star-making turn opposite Jane Wyman in Sirk’s classic 1955 romance film of that name. “Looking back at his body of work, knowing what we now know, is like gazing into a hall of mirrors: Roy Fitzgerald, gay man, performing the role of Rock Hudson, manly movie star, who would eventually take on roles that interrogate and exploit his double life,” Kijak wrote in his director’s statement. Courtesy Photofest/HBOįor documentarian Stephen Kijak, who first encountered Hudson on the silver screen in one of director Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic films of the 1950s, the blurring divide between Hudson’s private life and manufactured public persona, as well as his posthumous impact on the HIV/AIDS crisis, provided fertile ground to reintroduce the actor to new generations of cinephiles. (and later Roy Fitzgerald) in a small town in Illinois to becoming Hollywood’s Rock Hudson, one of the most venerated movie stars of his generation - all while under the ever-present threat of being publicly outed as gay (though his sexuality was considered an open industry secret). Using a wealth of archival materials, including personal photographs, home videos and interviews with colleagues, close friends and lovers, the film chronicles the actor’s journey from growing up as Roy Scherer Jr. The enduring legacy of Hudson - who died just shy of his 60th birthday in October 1985, less than three months after his publicist publicly confirmed his diagnosis - comes back into focus in “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed,” which premieres Wednesday on HBO. But after becoming one of the first celebrities to publicly disclose their HIV/AIDS diagnosis, Hudson unwittingly changed how the world responded to the epidemic. With his strapping frame and finely chiseled features, Rock Hudson epitomized masculinity and heterosexuality in the 1950s and ’60s, starring in a slew of romantic dramas and comedies that cemented his status as one of the final leading men of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |