Rochelle Hudson (born Rachael Elizabeth Hudson;[3] March 6, 1916 – January 17, 1972) was an American film actress from the 1930s through the 1960s.[1] Hudson was a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1931.
Early years
Hudson was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the daughter of Ollie Lee Hudson and Lenora Mae Hudson.[1] While in Oklahoma, she studied dancing, drama, piano, and voice. Hudson began her acting career as a teenager, and completed her high school education at a high school on the Fox studios lot.[3]
Hudson signed a contract with RKO Pictures on November 22, 1930, when she was 14 years old.[4]
She may be best remembered today for costarring in Wild Boys of the Road (1933), playing Cosette in Les Misérables (1935), playing Mary Blair, the older sister of Shirley Temple's character in Curly Top, and for playing Natalie Wood's mother in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). During her peak years in the 1930s, notable roles for Hudson included Richard Cromwell’s love interest in the Will Rogers showcase Life Begins at 40 (1935), the daughter of carnival barker W.C. Fields in Poppy (1936), and Claudette Colbert’s adult daughter in Imitation of Life (1934).
In 1939 Rochelle Hudson was working on a movie titled Convicted Woman for Columbia Pictures that was released in 1940. Another player in the movie was an actress named June Lang. During production the two struck up conversation in a friendly manner because both had worked on Shirley Temple movies, inspiring a sort of special "esprit de corps" between them. Like Hudson's career would soon be, Lang's film career would be interrupted as well, albeit for totally different reasons. Hudson took way too much time away from her acting career with her husband for reasons explained in the next paragraph. Lang got mixed up with and married a suspected heavyweight mob figure said to be a film producer named Johnny Roselli which, as a mob figure, was viewed way to unfavorable by the studios as well. Neither Hudson's nor Lang's careers really got back on track after the war. For more about the collaboration on their movie Convicted Women.
Because of the marked slowdown to an almost complete halt in Hudson's film career in the years just prior to the war and into its early years after having gone gangbusters for the whole decade before, people have long thought she had fallen into disfavor with the Hollywood powers that be or that her popularity had just waned to such a point she was simply just being passed over. However, on what some consider to be rather flimsy evidence, it has been reported, and what will be substantiated further down --- with only flimsy evidence found elsewhere notwithstanding --- that she had in fact been working as a spy during that period for the Naval Intelligence Service. She and her husband, posing as a civilian, were doing espionage work primarily in Mexico and together they posed as a vacationing couple to detect if there was any German or Japanese activity there.
Hudson was married four times. All the unions were childless. Her first marriage was to Harold Thompson, in 1939. He was the head of the Storyline Department at Disney Studios.
After their divorce in 1947, (but the trade publication Billboard reported that they divorced on September 4, 1945)[6] she married a second time the following year, to Los Angeles Times sportswriter Dick Irving Hyland. The marriage lasted two years before the couple divorced. Hudson married her third husband, Charles K. Brust, in Jackson, Missouri on September 28, 1956.[7]
Little is known of the marriage other than they were divorced by June 1962 (he remarried). Hudson's final marriage was to Robert Mindell, a hotel executive. The two remained together for eight years before they divorced in 1971.
Hudson actually was born in 1916, but the studio reportedly made her two years older for her to play a wider variety of roles, including romantic roles. In That's My Boy, she was cast as the mother of Gil Stratton, who was only six years her junior.
Death
In 1972, Hudson was found dead in her home at the Palm Desert Country Club. A business associate with whom she had been working in real estate discovered her body sprawled on the bathroom floor. She was 55 years old.[2] Hudson died of a heart attack brought on by a liver ailment.[8]
^Terrace, Vincent (2011). Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 through 2010 (2nd ed.). Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. p. 1067. ISBN978-0-7864-6477-7.
^"Divorces". Billboard. September 15, 1945. p. 70. Retrieved 23 April 2017.
