Rochelle Hudson

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]

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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).

She played Sally Glynn, the fallen ingenue to whom Mae West imparts the immortal wisdom "When women go wrong, men go right after them!" in the 1933 Paramount film, She Done Him Wrong. In the 1954–1955 television season, Hudson co-starred with Gil Stratton and Eddie Mayehoff in the sitcom That's My Boy,^[5] based on a 1951 Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin film of the same name.

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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 (although 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.

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]