later film career
-
Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Rock Hudson
streetlegal — 16 years ago(March 22, 2010 04:30 PM)
Why did Rock's film career pretty much end by the start of the 70's? He was presumably still a major film star in the mid 60's but after Seconds-a great film but a box office flop-he had a hit with Ice Station Zebra and The Undefeated but after that only made a handful of films. I know he made a successful move to TV with McMillan & Wife and made a couple of films in the 70's but his film career seemed to end rather abruptly. Perhaps it was just a case of the old style movie stars going out of fashion in the late 60's?
-
matt-282 — 15 years ago(May 30, 2010 10:47 AM)
Rock Hudson, a contract movie star, apparently decided not to renew his contract with MGM, Paramount, or the other studios by 1970 for a variety of professional and personal reasons. He apparently decided to focus most his talents on television and he more or less succeeded with McMillian and Wife, although he did occasionally appear in a lead or supporting part in an independent, TV, or theatrical movie during the 1970s and early 1980s. I guess when you're a big name Hollywood actor, everybody in the business wants something from you so he decided to give it a rest and focus on other areas. With the 1980s he did find work from bad proects, such as the Deviln Connection, to good projects, such as his stint on Dynasty (his very last role), but none of them come close to his success during the 1950s and 60s in the movies.
-
pengel-1 — 14 years ago(May 23, 2011 02:47 PM)
Hudson's career between, say, 1965 and 1971 is very similar to the trajectory of James Garner, George Peppard, Tony Curtis, Shirley MacClane, George Hamilton, Lana Turner, Debbie Reynolds, Robert Wagner, Anthony Quinn, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart. After career peaks earlier, all did movies of lesser quality and profit, then went to TV.
It wasn't an easy time for the those brought up by the studios. Even Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas did TV movies in the Seventies.
Once "Bonnie and Clyde,&b68quot; "The Graduate," X- and R-ratings and offbeat-looking actors became all the rage, it was a whole new game. Many of these studio-system stars didn't fit in with the new way of doing things. Garner said he couldn't get a decent script at that time; what he defined as a decent script is open to interpretation, of course.
Really, only Steve McQueen and Paul Newman had the right anti-hero persona, attitude and look to ride the wave successfully. -
TonTon — 4 years ago(August 06, 2021 08:14 AM)
Correct.
Stars of Hudson's generation failed to transition to the changing times of the late 1960s. This was true of many stars who became popular in the 1940s as well [like Lancaster, Douglas, Mitchum and Peck].
The stars of the late 1920s and 30s had a much longer run. Stars like Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, Joel McCrea and Fredric March [and a lot of others] were still doing excellent work in the 1950s.
I noticed too that the 1950s actors usually kept their popularity going if they became stars earlier in the decade. Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Tab Hunter, Rory Calhoun and Jeff Chandler kept their careers going longer than Rod Taylor, Troy Donahue, George Peppard, etc. -
iel79 — 14 years ago(April 26, 2011 10:57 AM)
I think it had much to do with the Studio-system and Henry Wilson his agent!
Wilson was not a good agent, when the Studios were strong he produced a few stars but he did not care more!He didn't see that the Studio-system was dying, he didn't bring up more interesting and different roles for Rock, he let him play this typical Rock Hudson movies! Good looking man and a woman!
He did not unterstand that Rock Hudson has to gr2000ew as an actor, because RH will be sometimes a older person and not the 30 year old hunk! When this images from the beefcake king goes what than? And than it happened, the Studies-system died and Rock was older too! Hudson had enough and separated from Wilson!
A lot of older Stars from the older system had now problems! He had luck to find a help in TV and in theater! Here he should go on, staying a while with the theater but I think he was unhappy with that alone he wanted more, back to the movies and here he did a few mistakes! I would not say "Seconds", this movie was made to early, wrong time! I would say, movies like "Embryo" or "All the pretty mates in a row" and "Hornest nest"! At least "The Ambassador"! He had later a woman as an agent but she was also not the best and I think Hudson was so desperate to make movies that he has hope with every script, even when his friends said, that story is horribly bad written!
The eighties were also years of bad film-making and when it went better it was to late for Hudson! He had no time to transform him from the beefcake-king to a older interesting actor! That's pitty but he had luck with the theater and TV, so many were not successfully with that and he showed more, not just movies, he worked also on TV and theater, a bigger horizon!